Aerial Photography can be quite tricky and this was brought home to me quite clearly again on Friday when I joined author and friend Sue Derwent (Sue, Pat and I have done many books and magazine stories together) on a helicopter trip down the KwaZulu Natal South Coast. We couldn’t have wished for a better day – bright and Sunny with a few fluffy clouds in the distance to give some interest to the sky and no wind to speak of. Due to the nature of the flight we were not able to slow down and get into position nice views, the whole thing had to happen “on the fly” if you’ll excuse the pun. So, we were doing about 120 knotts (about 200 kmh) at an altitude of about 500 feet so everything is whizzing by and to make matters worse the 2 blades of the Jet Ranger’s rotor give rise to a rhythmic “bumping” as you go along. This creates huge problems with trying to keep images sharp and in the old film days it was a nightmare!
My Nikon D3x with Nikon’s new 14 – 24 mm zoom was wonderful. It’s very low noise levels allowed me to crank up the ISO to 800 and shooting at f4 I was getting shutter speeds of around 1/2000 of a second. Sharp images all the way through. And on the computer screen at 100% they are STUNNING! I will post a selection of images soon but in the mean time have a look at the album Sue has put op on her Face Book site.
The next morning was very overcast and a fine rain was falling which made photography a little tricky and I ended up with a very wet lens. I did, though manage to shoot a little video and you can see this here:
By the way, We’ve got some very exciting Safaris happening in the near future so keep an eye on our blog as well as www.oldcanvasexpeditions.com.
