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| *SoulEyes Photography>>>Aerial Photography |
Any suggestions for aerial photography? |
I have just started taking aerial photos for our business/web site. Do I need a filter? Or rely on photoshop? Opening the window freaks me out so I have been shooting thru the glass. It was suggested to increase the ISO (did that) and set the histogram to high contrast ( have not been able to figure this out) Any suggestions are appreciated. Use a circular polarizer to filter out glass reflections. Reflections are difficult or impossible to remove digitally without losing image information. I am assuming you are shooting with a digital camera because you describe adjusting your histogram. For an aerial exposure, you do not want to stretch the histogram (high contrast) because you want to image high detail. Use good exposure to fill the histogram. Shoot at a fast shutter speed at least 1/500 sec. or faster. If you are shooting in daylight, you should get good exposure with f/11, 1/500 sec, and ISO 100 (maybe 200). Do not increase ISO past 400. That will only increase image noise. You want a low noise image, especially if you plan to enlarge areas. Don't shoot with an aperture any larger than f/8 (f/5.6 max). If you have low light conditions, bump up ISO one stop, then aperture (1 stop), then shutter speed 1 stop, in that order. You can boost detail with a UV daylight or 85B filter, taking out blue wavelengths. Rayleigh scatter from the atmosphere increases blue stray light in aerial imaging, so it is wise to filter some blue out. Histogram beats me as well. The windows of the plane will probably be dirty which messes up the picture and the glass will not necessarily be optically flat which also throws in distortion. Just keep your seat belt secured and attach a lanyard to your camera just in case you drop it so that you can shoot out the open door. If you are shooting film, go for a larger format. You can't shoot through glass and get good images. Bite the bullet, open the door/window, take extra shots, and by all means use Photoshop to clean-up, edit, crop and basically improve your photos. You are selling them after all. Right? You're coming into this at a good time. As the weather gets crisp and cool, you will have more haze-free days. You've GOTTA open the window, though! Heck, I hung out the open door of a Cessna! Get a ride in a high wing plane, as you can fly flat and level more of the time. Some planes have little windows that can flip open without too much drama, in case you see one like that. As far as adjusting contrast, you can do this without histogram histrionics. Just look around your shooting menu for contrast adjustment and you'll find it. I'm not especially recommending that you DO this, but just telling you how to find it. This might compensate for not using a haze filter, which I would suggest you try. We get lazy with Photoshop, thinking it can correct everything wrong with every picture, but it can't. If you don't have detail to start with, you won't have detail in the finished product. At least try it. A polarizing filter is helpful at times, also, especially if there is water in the scene. Don't fall out. High shutter speed - at least 1/1000. Polarizer and UV are good ideas - don't use more than two (I wouldn't use more than one unless the filters are good quality Multi-Coated ones) filters at a time. Don't shoot through the window - open it - but don't fall out (did I mention that yet?) Use a zoom lens and crop in-camera as much as possible. I'd use a film camera. A good 36mm negative contains around 36 megapixels of information and will likely be better than digital - especially if you're shooting at a higher ISO. You never know what part you're going to need to enlarge later on - or you may want some poster-sized prints. You didn't say how much high of an ISO, what camera, the resolution, lens, and a lot of other info that might help - so I'll leave that as a general suggestion. Check out Google Earth. You can probably find your area and examine aerial of satellite photos for the best altitudes and locations (you can pull GPS coordinates from there to use later also). But - hey you're paying the pilot and sticking your head out the window. Go up as often as you need to. ;) |
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