Have to admit – first helicopter flight. Great, fantastic, exhilarating, scary but not to be missed.
Well I did miss it, kind of. I only had a mere few minutes high over Aviemore for the Aviemore Highland Resort to take shots during the Harley Davidson Thunder in the Glens gathering. Taking two cameras on a first flight and I have to say until you get up there and the going and the coming down you have little idea of how to prepare.
First and foremost are the flight ’rules’ … umm can’t remember any of them. Then I was warned not to stick a lens and camera too far out of the tiny window. Yea, I thought. Soon found out why. On top of the helicopter are long things called rotor blades. These tend to go round quite fast, you know, to create downdraft so that the thing flies. So the newbie here decides to try to get a better shot with camera out of the window. Big mistake – just about lost the whole thing in the downdraft. Only did it once.
Anyway a great thrill but concentrating so much on getting the shots and looking through a lens, I pretty well missed the experience.
The helicopter
Aviemore
Aviemore Highland Resort
Neat aerial views Simon, glad you survived and the cameras came back, certainly not as easy as it looks, I prefer a fixed wing Cessna 172.
Thanks Gary – and from an expert. Guess there’s something of a swap from downdraft to a plane’s sidedraft from forward speed but though not having stuck my head out of a plane it’s probably a bit less?? Also think if there’s a next time I’ll lower the ISO from 1/8000sec to get a lower ISO.
In fixed wing it is critical to keep the lens out of the slipstream, with longer lenses I am often leaning backwards into the cockpit.Since I started using the Canon 5d MK2 I do not have a long lens to be concerned about, it produces big images which I can crop from and I find a 105 mm is enough , so seldom reach for the 500mm lens.
Good point about not necesarily needing to stick the lens out. Yes D3 is full fame too so if I’m ever back in the same situation will remember to crop any windows edges out.