Taking pictures from an airplane

[mtucker250]

Hi all,
One of my neighbours has a cottage and has asked me to take picture of his lot from the air in his small float plane (Cessna 182). I have a Nikon D70 with a 18-55mm ED lens. Can anyone recommend any settings, techniques or better lenses that I could use to make the most of these pictures? I would be willing to rent a lens for the day.

Thanks!

 

[WDodd]

The only thing I can recommend is to make sure your neighbor does banking turns so that you can get a downward angle on his cottage.

Every year I do stuff like this for our 7 acre corn maze, it is quite fun.

You might want to take a longer lens depending on how high in the air he is. What I usually shoot is quite large so I can get by with the 18-55 or something similar.

 

[Mike_E]

Nice daylight and a really fast shutter speed, I'm thinking. As I remember, small planes vibrate a lot which would cause motion blur.

 

[astrostu]

Another issue is shooting through the glass or plastic of the cockpit. It may take some clever PhotoShopping to get rid of reflections, or a fortuitous angle. At least, that's my experience when shooting through airplane windows.

 

[Zoso]

I've had a few successful plane shots, I found using a lower aperture (f.11) etc and no flash worked oh and obviously fast shutter speed :thumbup:

and alternating between a telephoto and a wide angle to get different pov/focus

 

[mtucker250]

Thanks for the help, Ill be sure to post some of the pictures after I go up!

 

[&Denekamp]

I was always told that when taking pictures through glass or something similar, you should try and hold the lens as close to it as possible (and probably pick the cleanest area to shoot though), this way you make sure it is as out of focus as it could possibly be, and it shows up less in your pictures.

Good luck!

 

[keith204]

Excellent! I'm glad somebody mentioned this. A friend is wanting me to take pictures of their lot, and their neighbors, for Christmas cards. I assume a larger aperture will be better for shooting through windows, but to get everything I want in focus, I might need a smaller aperture... tradeoff here I assume. I sure wish he'd just strap me on the wing .

Well, you see my equip. I'll be taking pictures of houses with about an acre or less of land each. Which ones would you be sure to have in your bag? I'm planning on the 70-200 and 17-85. I suppose it really depends what altitude the plane is flying at.

 

[Snyder]

Make sure to aim at a 45 degree angle when taking the photo, I shoot on shutter priority most of the time cause the the high action areail photography I do or manual. But if lighting is good my settings are around F/8 and 10/4000sec I use sometimes a 18-200 Nikkor VR lense average focal length is 100mm+ but that is dependant on how tight of a photo you want and the distant you are from the ground.