Photographing Costa Rica’s South Pacific Coast from a helicopter

I recently had the opportunity, as part of a client shoot for Bahia Escondida on Costa Rica’s South Pacific coast, to photograph from a helicopter, and it is an amazing experience! If you ever have the opportunity to photograph from a helicopter, I highly recommend it. But before you go, there are a number of useful things you should know. Before the shoot here in Costa Rica (my first time in a helicopter), I found an article by EJ Peiker, one of the editors of Naturescapes, to be invaluable. It saved me from some incorrect equipment choices, exposure mistakes, and probably at least one lens hood flying into the copter’s tail rotor! See EJ’s article here: http://www.naturescapes.net/062004/ej0604.htm 

I shot with my 20D and Canon’s 17-40 mm f4 L lens most of the time, occassionally switching over to my Tokina 28-70 mm f2.8 ATX-Pro lens. Both of these gave good results. I shot on aperture priority at each lens’ widest aperture and adjusted my ISO as necessary to keep my shutter speed above 1/500 second or so. We flew in a Bell Jet Ranger with the doors off, and the ride was very smooth. I imagine that IS would have been helpful as it would have allowed me to drop to slower shutter speeds at lower ISO values, but I don’t think that it’s essential. The perfect lens, in my opinion, would be Canon’s 24-105 mm f4 L IS zoom. This would give you enough wide angle even on a mag. factor body such as the 20D (on the 20D, when I zoomed out to 17mm it was hard to eliminate both rotor blades and skids) and would also give you enough reach on the long end for a full-frame body such as the 5D. I kept a polarizing filter on each lens at all times. Despite the cost of two stops of light, the polarizer really helped to saturate the colors of both ocean and forest.

One morning we flew to Punta Burica, near Costa Rica’s border with Panama. This is without a doubt one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever encountered. Morning backlight combined with blue-green waves and forested cliffs to offer some truly dramatic landscape images of this uninhabited stretch of coastline. Of course the aerial view made it even more spectacular. See these images and a few more from my helicopter adventure in the gallery below (EXIF shooting data included for those interested in the tech details): http://www.deepgreenphotography.com/blog/helicopter/index.html 

 

Nos vemos en el campo,

Greg