Survey Flight 2 Aug 2019
Recently I took another flight over Yellowstone to gather photos – not only for the photography side of my business, but also to write more Get to Know the Geysers posts. It’s also an efficient way to keep tabs on the thermal features.
This time I invited a couple of other gazers to share this flight with me. While it was windy on the ground and over the Cody area, once we got into the park, as I often find driving in, the winds were calm. It turned out to be a beautiful flight – full of lots of turns to capture the shots, and after a couple of hours of that, while looking through the camera’s viewfinder, I was about at my limit. I’m very grateful for the rock-solid stomach I have that allows me to do things like this – even after a full breakfast.
I’ll still need to take at least one more flight this year as there are still a few shots I didn’t quite capture – however, not due to anything but what I’ve known for a while. My camera is dying a slow death. The on/off switch died awhile back – thankfully in the on position. And the focus is now going away that caused many missed shots on this flight. I lost about 10% to entirely blurry photos and another 10-15% to slightly blurry images that should have been captured. This is above the ~10% I know I’ll miss simply from shooting through a window in a moving plane. 30%+ loss on a flight is unacceptable for me. So – it’s time to bite the bullet and get a new camera.
That said, I did capture many shots I hoped to get. Here are some shots from that flight. All were taken with a zoom lens because, like with wildlife, you have to keep a certain distance. These and more will soon be in my gallery where you can order prints.
