In Flight Photography and the ZV-1

For those of you who don’t know, I do actually have a real job (at least until I retire in 18 months) as an Airline Captain with one of the major Australian Airlines. This gives me some very unique opportunities to see things very few people on earth get to witness. This can be natural phenomenon that just can’t be seen from the ground ( the curvature of the earth, the earths shadow rising from the ground into the sky during sunset, Full circle rainbows below you). Sometimes it’s stuff that everyone sees, I just see it from a very unique perspective (a thunderstorm from above) and other times it’s man made like satellite’’s below you and as bright as search lights.

Over the years I’ve tried to capture this with various camera’s and support rigs. It’s a very difficult thing to do with any quality as it’s VERY dark, the camera is moving or at least vibrating with the engine vibration and the sights mentioned above can be rare. I’ve used equipment from Sony Alpha series camera’s (too big), Go Pro’s (they were the absolute worst), the full range of Osmo Pockets (they do a great job during daylight, particularly for time lapse) but capturing stuff at night with any quality has been a technical nightmare. The equipment just isn’t up to my very specialised needs.

I’ll now address the elephant in the room. Is this safe given I’m in charge of an aircraft with over 200 people? The answer is obviously yes or I wouldn’t be doing it. There are always 2 crew in the cockpit and while we’re very busy during takeoff, climb, descent and landing, the cruise is relatively calm. Some of my flights can be 6 to 7 hours long so it’s only during those quiet periods that I set this up.

It’s also necessary to be about 40 to 100 nautical miles away from a storm to make a good photo. At that distance we are generally in smooth air and just chugging along. If I need to thread our way between storms, then I’m not taking photos, I’m doing my job. I do often set up time lapse’s before top of descent or on the ground before departure but once I push the button, it just does it’s own thing and I can completely ignore it. My rig is safe and secure and if the turbulence gets too bad, then it’s no good for photography anyway so I secure everything back in my bag.

It’s not like driving a car where you always have to have your eyes on the road. The autopilot is on and we are mainly monitoring and updating emergency airports and communications should anything go bing or bang. So I hope this allays some of you concern.

This type of photography has some unique challenges as you might imagine. The main one is movement. Aircraft don’t bounce around in the sky as much as people think. Even during severe turbulence the movement is generally less than a meter, it’s just that it happens quickly. But even in absolutely calm air, the engines still send a vibration through the airframe and therefore my rig. Image stabilisation definitely helps but I don’t think it’s really designed for this type of movement. But the gimbal on the Osmo Pocket really smooths out any movement and gives an exceptionally smooth video or time lapse. They really are great during the day when theirs plenty of light.

But at night, the real problems begin. The exposure triangle is my enemy. Aperture is easy – wide open!

But with a wide open aperture, focus is absolutely critical. The Infinity mark on the lens is rarely infinity in reality. The manufacturers have to allow a temperature tolerance with the expansion and contraction of the lens at different temperatures. Therefore I have found true infinity is often around 40 to 120m on the distance scale. For you nightscape photographers, you understand how important and how difficult focusing in the dark can be.

Speed needs a bit of thought and really comes down to what I’m shooting. Thunderstorms are natures flash gun. So I can have the shutter set at about 1 second. The shutter can be open capturing darkness but once there’s a flash of lightning, I’ve got it!. Or do I? If there’s aircraft movement, it’s blurred. If the ISO is wrong, it’s blown out or too dark. It’s very hit and miss and I don’t use a lightning trigger, too much extra gear. So out of every 200 images I shoot, I might get 1 that works. It’s a very low hit rate. Thankfully the other 199 duds are free.

The final part of the Exposure Triangle is ISO. Photographing thunderstorms is like photographing fireworks. You have to guess an ISO beforehand but the result depends 100% on how bright the firework is. It’s the same with lightning, a little flash is not enough and a really big flash will blow the whites out. A really big flash is the best target though so I tend to set the ISO around 640. This also keeps the scene dark before and after the flash.

So why not just set Program mode and let the camera do it’s thing. It is possible and to be honest I will be experimenting with that a bit more into the future. But I found older model camera’s like my A7Rm2 and 3 just couldn’t cope with all the variables in a few milliseconds. The results were total black to total white and anything in between. But modern camera’s may be better at this.

I really enjoy creating time lapse of my departures and landings. Thankfully, my DJI Osmo Pocket 3 is just spectacular for that. It’s small, lightweight, requires a very small support rig (suction cup), saves the individual RAW files and creates the timelapse internally! The gyro stabilised gimbal works very well most of the time although a few “G’s” can really upset it. It even does a pretty good job at night over cities. The timelapse below is an approach into Melbourne from Perth.

But put it in a nearly dark sky and watch the quality plumet. This was a small thunderstorm near Alice Springs with a sliver of moon but it is basically unusable. PS, right at the end on the bottom we fly past a very large bush fire.

Phones are getting better much over the years and I have to admit, they do a good job in good lighting conditions. I shot this one of the recent bush fires in northern Victoria on the 8th January 26 with my Galaxy S22.

Some of the First Officers have new iPhones and they can even do an extraordinary job at night, often better than my A7Rm5. They seem to take a video of about 5 to 10 seconds and then somehow join it all into a pretty good image. (I’ll happily stand corrected on how it actually does it).

The biggest difficulty above all is just a straight star image. It is virtually impossible with current camera technology. It’s like taking a 15 second nightscape photo with your tripod while standing on a boat. There’s just too much movement. I need to crank the ISO up to at least 12800 or higher and even excellent noise reduction software struggles with that.

So finally to my latest little toy, the Sony ZV-1 Vlogger camera. Yes you got that right, it’s a Vlogger camera! But for it’s size, it is really surprising me with it’s capabilities. The ZV-1 was released about 5 years ago but boy it was ahead of it’s time. There are many updates and newer variation models since then but the original still has the fastest lens. The menu and features are very similar to my A7Rm5 . The 1 inch sensor is brilliant and the inbuilt 24-70mm lens has a wide open aperture of F1.8. I t even has Bright Monitoring so I can compose in the dark. It’s really small and light which means I am reducing the size of my attaching rig which also makes it a lot easier to get through security these days. I shot this time lapse with it a few nights ago on a flight from Sydney to Avalon as a test and I’m very happy with it. The quality is excellent and because it works the same as my A7Rm5 (including presets) it’s just so easy to use. I had to mount it upside down in my rig but it compensated for that and I didn’t need to do anything about that in post. The flip out screen faces me so I can easily see what’s it’s doing but I did close it for takeoff so it wouldn’t be a distraction.

So is this my ultimate solution? It’s a bit early to tell yet as I haven’t been anywhere near a thunderstorm since getting this last week. I did shoot a few stills with it mid flight where it was very dark and they had a lot of motion blur because we had a little turbulence. Even at the time, I knew they wouldn’t be useable but I wanted to see how much grain there was. I shot at ISO6400 and that easily cleaned up in post production to an excellent result. So far, I’m very impressed with it. It punches way above it’s weight and it’s weight is really light. I might even update this blog in a few months once I’ve had more experience with it.

I hope this has given you a little insight into my world and how I try to bring my photography into it. If you’d like to see more of my flying life and how I have captured it, I created a short video about 3 years called “From the Flight Deck”. Click on the link below and it will take you to my You Tube video.

Thanks again for reading.