Helicopter Aerial Photography  |  Las Vegas Nevada

Helicopter Aerial Photography
Oregon State University – Weatherford Hall

Helicopter Aerial Photography from a helicopter or a wing-over Cessna is amazing way to lift the camera platform in order to show, in a much larger context, how and where your subject or target of interest is situated.  The Robinson family of helicopters are very popular and it’s usually cost effective to hire one for most populated urban areas.  It would even be reasonable to transport one via a ground vehicle to your project area if it was complex project with multiple days of flying and your area of interest was a hundred miles or more distant from the nearest airfield or equipment.  

In comparison to drones, fixed wing and helicopter aircraft can fly higher, can fly longer, can fly farther and can have open doors or windows through which you may use your full arsenal of cameras and lenses.  In contrast drones are most frequently sold with fixed lenses which are wide angle.  Good for one purpose, a wide field of view, but not universally helpful for showing variations of the subject in terms of location with the relative landmarks, other buildings parks or structures including arterials and highways. 

 

 

Aerial Panoramas represent to me the most captivating and interesting use of the aerial platform. This entails getting back from the target a little ways, flying slower at a lower elevation, and stitching together a long lens, zoomed-in, narrower field of view series of frames. This would be very much like handing your client and other viewers a pair of binoculars and letting them get a good and safe long look at your location. Its empowering. Its captivating. Its memorable. Its unique.  Unlike wide angle lens that have a severe vanishing point, centered and directly in the middle of the frame, an aerial panorama has a vanishing point that goes out to the distant horizon. A truly captivating and marvelous (and mathematical) feature of this type of image construction.

 

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