Tips on helicopter photography

With less than a week before Mirage of the Ocean opens, I wanted to take a minute and talk about helicopter photography.

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:

1)      Shoot fast. Try for shutter speeds of at least 1/640th or faster to compensate both for the helicopter’s directional movement and the shakes from the engine. Use a continuous shooting mode to take a fast series of photos.

2)      Plan on a minimum amount of gear. Helicopters are cramped spaces, and if you have three or four photographers, the space needed for gear can add up quickly. Changing lenses in a helicopter isn’t allowed, because you can’t have anything loose in the cabin. I found a 24-70 f2.8 worked extremely well. I usually shot between f8-f11.

3)      Polarizing filter. This is a good idea if you are over water or want the sky to be bluer.

4)      Wear dark clothing. Darker clothing means fewer reflections means less time having to Photoshop out annoying bright spots later.

5)      Get close. If you are in a doors-on helicopter, get your lens as close to the glass as you can.

6)      Watch out for the blades in your shots. With a 24mm focal length, I initially got blades in my shots. Zoom in,look down for angles, or ask your pilot to go higher so you can shoot the horizon without the blades.