Aerial photography!

[Recty]

I'm pretty excited, in about 2 hours I'll be heading out in a helicopter to get some pictures of the power plant that powers 75% of Alaska.

I work for the power company and we do an annual report which is mailed to all our customers plus an annual meeting with a slideshow. Our current database of pictures for the plant is pretty old and nothing too great, so they asked if I would go and I jumped at the chance.

Anyone have any tips to give me? I'll be taking the pictures out of a Bell 206L4 Longranger (http://www.bellhelicopter.textron.com/en/aircraft/commercial/bell206L-4.cfm) which has curved windows, but it also has small ports that can slide open for picture taking which I'm going to try to use as much as possible since I know how curved plexiglass affects picture quality

I plan on basically taking 8 pictures around the plant at about 3 or 4 different elevations. So I'll circle the plant and take pictures every 40 or 50 degrees, then rise up another 500 feet and do it again.

 

[koensayr]

Figure out what time they have the flight planned. If you can pick, try to pick a time close to sunrise or sunset.

And once you know the time, think about the angle of the sun and the shadows, and plan your pictures accordingly.

Since it will be 100% natural lighting, I think your biggest challenge will be if you have harsh direct sunlight, and there will just be too many stops of lighting difference between the lit parts of the plant and the the shadowed parts for the camera to handle. And since you will be in a moving helicopter, it's pretty much impossible to bracket and then combine in post-processing.

Edit: Doh, just read the 2hour part again and looked at your post time. Oh well, I hope your photo-shoot went well.

 

[Recty]

It went pretty well... I'll paw through my pictures over the next couple days and post them.

Thanks for the helpful advice, albeit a little late

 

[Octoshark]

Yea post those pics please

 

[Recty]

Nothing too amazing, I just started pawing through them all.

 

[klepto]

I really like the composition of the above shot. Nicely done.

 

[Recty]

I really like the composition of the above shot. Nicely done.

Thanks! It was actually much harder to do aerial shots than I had thought it would be. This helicopter is NOT set up for picture taking, it's purely for transport and it was difficult to ever get a good picture. Plus it was windy so the heli was swiveling back and forth in the air and never really letting me line up a shot well.

I'll go through some more tonight.

 

[koensayr]

Thanks for the pics, Recty.

Did you use automatic metering? (full auto, aperture priority, shutter priority?)
Because it seems that the pictures are such that the camera metered for 18% gray.

I would suggest increasing the exposure by 1 or 1.5 stops in post to make the snow look whiter.


Edit: It would be tough for the shots with sky in them unless you had a gradient filter.

 

[Recty]

Thanks for the pics, Recty.

Did you use automatic metering? (full auto, aperture priority, shutter priority?)
Because it seems that the pictures are such that the camera metered for 18% gray.

I would suggest increasing the exposure by 1 or 1.5 stops in post to make the snow look whiter.


Edit: It would be tough for the shots with sky in them unless you had a gradient filter.

Yeah, I used shutter priority for all but a few of my shots. I've already played around with exposure somewhat on these, but a blanket exposure change on most of the shots blows out the detail in at least one aspect of the picture.

I'm going to end up spending some time and using masks to just correct the parts of the picture I need to. These ones I posted arent the finished result, I just wanted to get some out for people to see I think this weekend I'll go through the images better and do some fixing.