timsdd aka Tim’s Digital Darkroom

The Story: One of the gentlemen in our church is a retired pilot, he owns a small single prop airplane that he uses to fly around…pretty neat hobby right! Actually he uses it to visit his son’s family in OK quite often, but I digress.

The Reason: Our church has been building a new sanctuary for the past ~ 2 years, and it is nearing completion. Opening day for the new sanctuary is set for Mothers Day. He wanted to see if we could get some neat pictures of the church from the air to show on opening day :)

The Outcome: I was happy with what I got for what I was using, but if I ever did aerial photography for $$ (particularly @ dusk or after sunset, I’d need to upgrade my lens (honest, I’m not just saying that to lobby for a new toy!!)

The Setup: I was using my Canon 24-105/4/IS the entire time; the range was pretty good, plenty wide, the zoom wasn’t quite as tight as I wanted but no way I could have not used an IS lens. We took off right @ dusk so the light was minimal. I shot wide open F/4 the entire time and tried to keep the shutter speed > = 1/100 but that was not fast enough. Often times, at least after the sun went down I found myself in a bad spot being near 1/60th of a second or lower…far to slow for a moving aircraft! I think our air speed was ~ 90 knots +/-15.

I was barely getting these shutter speeds @ 3200ISO mind you!!! Here is where the new insane ISO’s of the Canon 5DMII would come in handy! 6400ISO+ would have sure helped me out…noise not withstanding. The biggest improvement I could make though, is using a different lens; namely the Canon 70-200/2.8/IS….that would put me in a much more desirable position in terms of zoom & shutter speeds.

I had thought of renting it for our 2nd time out to shoot the church but it is a hard lens to come by when renting!
We need to do it again b/c for some reason the flood lights of the church were not on…only a few interior lights and the base of the steeple.

Yes! I need to update my watermark!! Shows you how many pictures I have taken thus far this year

Small craft must maintain 1K feet so these were all near that and again with my lens, most of the shots I took here
80-105mm (X1.6 crop factor)

No clouds!!!!!!!!!!! Boooooooooo! Maybe next time!

The Taylor airport moments after take off

I’m so glad the woman next to me offered her window seat so that she could sit by her husband.

Unfortunately I was not nearly as fortunate on the much longer flight home.

BUT I made good use of the sunrise in the window seat.

Window seats FTW!

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Funky Escalators, we’ve all seen them.

Actually I have no idea what that means, they were normal.

The filters and editing I applied to the pictures are the funky part!

I wanted to use them as stock but I shot them @ 400ISO….just killing time between flights basically.

Since they are too noisy to use as stock photos, I made them available free for download @ picbait.com