I’ve been interested in photography since before I started flying, so taking photos while flying always seemed like a good match. I’ve carried a camera in my flight bag since my private training.
I took this photo of the Philadelphia skyline from a Cessna 152 when I was 15 or 16 years old. The older Cessnas are good photography platforms for a couple of reasons. First, the high wing means you have a wider cone of view that you can shoot from without getting the wing in the shot. Second, the windows on the older models would swing up all the way to the underside of the wing, so you could lean out with the camera pretty far if you had to.
Nowadays, my girlfriend takes most of the photos while I fly. I try to avoid distractions while flying, especially in more “intense” phases of flight (in the pattern, during climb out/descent, or any time close to the ground), so it’s nice to have a second set of hands. Once I’m set up in cruise and I have some time to breathe, I’ll take the camera and do some of my own shooting. Other times, I’ll ride along with other club members while they’re doing currency training with our instructor.
With both my girlfriend and me in the plane, we can take shots like this one:
On final at Westchester County Airport (KHPN), Nancy was able to snap this shot straight out of the windscreen as I angled the plane into a slight crosswind (you can see the wind sock just above the approach lights to the left of the runway). Digital equipment makes it cheap to shoot more or less continuously through the whole turn to final and pick the best angle afterwards.
I keep an album on Flickr for our aerial photography, which is where the photos on this blog all come from.
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