Some assignments let you experiment more than others, which is really rewarding and helps to advance your experience.
A recent one that III had was a shoot for Harbour Air. Not only were we shooting airplanes from a helicopter, which is always fun, but we got to attach a camera to the wing of one of the DeHavilland DHC-3 Turbine Single Otters.
Thats not something that is done easily or on a whim. The guys at Harbour air were excited about this so we got a lot of support from them. The paperwork and the safety precautions were all handled by them perfectly. We handled the technical part of it and of course the shooting – the fun parts.
Setting up the remote camera
We used a Manfrotto ball-head to attach a Canon 1D Mark II, to the underside of the wing on the Otter. We used a Canon 17-40 with a polarizer and a pocket wizard with a remote cord. This was then packed in gaffer tape. Both to secure all the cables and to give some protection against wind and waves that are an essential part of a Seaplane take off and landing. The gaffer tape was also used to lock the focus on the lens.
The camera was on shutter priority so that we could have the shutter high enough all the time to negotiate the vibrations coming from the Otter. We set the ISO to 800 to have some lee-way for the aperture, I find that higher ISO properly exposed is by far better than low ISO under exposed.
As we followed the Otter we fired the remote and hoped for the best, the hard part about this all, is the fact that its a trial and error process. We could not see the motif or the background as we were shooting so a lot of guesswork was in order as well as shooting as much as possible.
Mount Baker, Vancouver and a single Otter
