Zlin 26 series is a great airplane also for aerial photography – just sit in the front seat and slide the canopy a bit. If properly maintained it will not slide fully and you have great view. Just make sure the guy in the back at controls is “well” dressed. The attached picture is an example. taken back in 2010, Canon 350D, no image stabilization at all.
I’ve had a Cessna window depart when opening in flight (it was on my Cessna 140 in Houston, the window ended up in Galveston Bay). Normally you’d open it fully and it would lie against the bottom of the wing, but this time, it opened a bit, fluttered, then departed the airframe…4 days before we were supposed to fly to Oshkosh!
We did get a replacement in time.
The Auster has sliding windows (similar to a Mk.1 Mini) which don’t have this risk, but can’t be opened as wide – but usually fine for taking photographs.
Not many types can have windows open 
On a TB you are likely to get the door departing the hinges and possibly taking out the vertical stabiliser, with fatal results. As a minimum there will be very expensive damage (4 digits plus; I’ve seen it done on the ground by wind).
The older TBs have a little window on the left door which many find quite useful and you can shoot through that, but the angles are limited.
If a camera is focused on infinity, and is set to a reasonable aperture for a good shutter speed (say less than F8) then it won’t see scratches. However, scratches will show up as a reduced contrast; much more so if there is sunlight hitting that window surface.
What gets more difficult is shooting through the propeller. Then you need a slower shutter, say 1/80 to completely remove a prop running at say 2500rpm, and to get 1/80 without overexposing you need a smaller aperture (say F16). Or use a neutral density (ND) filter but that’s a hassle, even if your camera can take a screw-on filter. And scratches then show up more.
I tend to just open the windows. However when I got my aircraft it did have a scratch (not very deep but annoying enough) from part of a window lock mechanism left on. After asking around I tried a bit of peek metal polish which worked a treat and totally removed it. I haven’t noticed any optical clarity difference, but haven’t looked in detail. I was more than happy with the fix.
It much depends on how your plane has been looked after. I’ve had mine since 2002 and have been the only pilot nearly the whole time; certainly since 2006. If it was an 18 year old rental or syndicate plane then it would be very different.
There may be some polish which can work temporarily to fill in scratches. I suspect Plexus does this to some extent, with very fine ones.
For sure the biggest issue is the canopy you are taking photos through – it will have reflections and possibly scratches, which you possibly (probably) will not see until after you get back on the ground. The only solution to this is to take absolutely loads of shots and hope one is OK or can be cropped to a good image on you favorite photo-app when back on the ground.
Regards, SD..
The biggest problems are haze and reflections. Nice cloudless VFR usually means haze
Whilst I enjoy using film, it’s usually too much hassle to take proper photos while flying. Even with not focussing it still takes time to think about light, speed, aperture etc (only 2 out of 8 cameras have (working) lightmeters). I’ll try again with someone else flying and see what happens. The negatives are scanned on a Fujifilm SP3000 and I’ve been very happy with the results: largest print from the scan is A2 size and no loss of quality.
The lens makes a big difference, e.g. Praktikars are only good for close-ups, but Jupiter and Helios (Soviet Zeiss copies) are much better for landscapes, with Minolta Rokkor somewhere in between.
My best film aerial photo, Didcot power station, Zorki 4 camera with Jupiter 8 lens.
I got a Sony Cybershot camera in 2006 that took good photos, examples in this Corsica thread.
Keeping the aeroplane out of the frame can be a challenge, but a clean composite wing and winglets can look good.
I will dropbox some to you. They are about 20MB. I don’t have any because I convert the CR2 files (the G7X doesn’t do DNG) to uncompressed TIFF with a Canon batch converter because my version of Lightroom (I refuse to go for the Adobe’s £10/month rent ripoff scheme) doesn’t do CR2, and then I delete them.
Most of the pics here were done with the G7X.
Peter wrote:
I have recently got a Canon G7X
I would like to get one RAW image from that Camera to try it out in Lightroom if you could? maybe on email?? I was going to buy a G7X for my business partner who is less into photography than me. It seems like it is a good compact camera and can do good video also.
I don’t know if Olympus ever made one.
I had an OM2SP for many years which was all black. That was the first SLR which actually delivered good pics virtually all the time – due to the spot meter.
I used to get my film cheap as short ends (recanned bits of film returned at the end of a movie) from stock shops
10/10 for imagination
IMO a digital SLR would need to be around 64 mega watsits to match that of a 35mm full frame.
Which film? With Provia 100, you would see the grain at 64MP resolution if zoomed 1:1 so there is no real “information” there. You just end up with a massive jpeg if you can it to 64MP. When I scanned my slides (5000dpi) I got 90MB TIFFs and I ran Photoshop in a batch mode to convert them to jpegs and found that ~5MB jpegs were as good as was extractable. Any more and no difference could be seen, at pixel level.
Mind you then again so are most of my contempories:)
The objective is to out-live all one’s contemporaries
