Over Thanksgiving, I put down a deposit on what will be my fifth dedicated photo trip. If you haven’t done something like this before, these are trips led by other photographers in areas they are familiar with.

While many of us, especially landscape and wildlife shooters, like photographing on our own, there are a lot of benefits to a well-run photo trip.

Helicopter photography is action photography with some added wrinkles – you are hundreds or sometimes thousands of feet above your subject and vibrating in a tin can.

Some locations will allow doors-off photography – meaning there’s nothing between your lens and the subject but air. Most tours require doors on for insurance purposes, though, which means photographers are compensating for plastic windows.

For the New Zealand adventure, we took three helicopter flights, all of which were doors-on. Several photos from those flights are included in the show.

 Here are a few tips I picked up: