get someone else to fly.
Or the autopilot 
BTW I do shoot everything in RAW and then put it through Lightroom. The phone too – a vast improvement in quality. It’s a very quick process and you get better photos because airborne photography often presents challenges like haze. Also it avoids the usually dodgy jpeg processing.
skydriller wrote:
If you are taking photographs, get someone else to fly. Or you fly and get someone else to take photographs.
+1
Peter wrote:
Or the autopilot
+2
But now the question on stable camera modes: HDG or NAV? or PIT or ALT?
The best shots we got so far was flying over nice scenery with C177RG with “camera windows” on each side flying at 90kts and 1500ft agl
I’ve taken loads of pics in a ~ 60 degree roll, with both hands off the yoke The TB20 flies like that quite happily … for a certain amount of time. In a low wing plane you sometimes need to do that to get the wing out of the way.
a ~ 60 degree roll, with both hands off the yoke
Design in GA is for hands off neutral stability in a turn at around 30-35 degrees bank, in a 60 degree bank you are inside negative lateral stability zone
Indeed; you have to shoot fast
Most photos of The Needles are done that way.
RobertL18C wrote:
Design in GA is for hands off neutral stability in a turn at around 30-35 degrees bank, in a 60 degree bank you are inside negative lateral stability zone
Although on a high wing the 60deg turn is used to point the wing to the feature or hide it before pressing on the camera
Let’s not start again on turn angle, speed and power to fly handoff…
I had a problem with my first digital camera, as the Jodel cockpit temperature in winter was below its specification, and even if kept under my jacket it gave up quickly when used.
My next one, a Panasonic Lumix, had a subzero range.
I have a Lumix (Panasonic) DMC-ZS50 – I think it’s called something else in Europe. It has a 30:1 optical zoom, excellent Leica lens, and fits in my pocket. I confess I do use my phone more and more, but the quality difference is huge, especially if you need a bit of zoom. I don’t see any point in a DSLR now that this kind of zoom range is available.
The quality difference between digital photos and film is amazing – in a good way. I recently put a second monitor on my desk which normally cycles through 3000 or so of my favourite photos, including some scans of film prints. They all look awful, despite many being taken on a very respectable Canon SLR. The digital photos survive being blown up to fill a 24" monitor.
I have some excellent pictures taken from aircraft, not professional quality though – for that you really need to get the windows out of the way. The most challenging one I’ve taken was from a knife edge in the Pitts, you can see it here: https://n5296s.blogspot.com/2010/09/halfway-to-upside-down.html .
Indeed, the DMC-ZS50 is one of a class of very good cameras which will way outperform any phone and yet it still fits into a (large) pocket.
I went for the Canon G7X because it was the best quality one could get in that size/shape which is similar to the DMC-ZS50. It was about 2x more expensive.
Film was indeed rubbish. I started in 1975 or so and would say the only film which was anything like a €200/$200 pocket camera was Kodachrome 25, which was impractical because it needed a tripod (or holding the camera against a tree, etc) for most shots. In the last days of film, for me about 2004, Provia 100 was probably as good as Kodachrome 25 and much more usable. The absolute pits was Kodachrome 400. I managed to sell my many kg of film gear on Ebay to a Spanish student who was doing a photography degree and – in an echo of today’s WW1 PPL training – they were required to shoot on film One of the many hassles of film was that some got lost in the post to the lab so e.g. I might take 25 rolls on a trip to Bryce Canyon (one of the world’s most scenic locations) and 3 of them never came back. One never knows if somebody in the lab just liked the photos and stole them… To minimise x-ray exposure I used to post the exposed rolls to the lab from wherever I shot them. Today I could not go back to film because my back could not take the weight of what I used to carry around.
The TB20 is better than many planes for photos because the side windows have decent size flat portions
Continuously curved canopy designs make it much harder.
One gotcha is that most lens filters have a serrated front edge
and this is easily bumped against the window, damaging it. Accordingly, I have filed these serrations off on my (skylight) filters and polished them with fine emery paper, so if the lens is accidentally bumped it doesn’t do damage.
Regarding temperature, I would think that most GA cockpits would not be too cold for this to be an issue. That said, I have found that almost everything stops working pretty fast when skiing at -25C. The Samsung phone (S7 on my last trip; I hope the new S10e will be better) would shut down very early; probably around 0C. The G7X carried on for longer; maybe -10C. The Pentax K1 never stopped working though.
This is a good thread on photography.
