I love the views from above, I think it's noticeable :) Usually I photograph them with a drone, but sometimes it's different. The pictures that I show you today are taken with a regular camera — but from a helicopter.
Shooting with a drone is convenient, you yourself choose where to fly and how long to stay at any point, trying to take pictures from different angles. With a helicopter, in this sense, it is more difficult — it flies along its own route, which the pilots choose, and at the same time it flies rather fast, so you just try to photograph what you see and what you have time to do. But due to the speed and range of the helicopter, rather large distances are overcome in one flight, which means that a variety of landscapes is provided.
You can see and shoot as much beauty from a height as you can stand at the open window without freezing from the wind rushing inside (well, or as much as other people sitting inside can withstand) :) This is a huge plus of a helicopter with opening windows — shooting through the glass would be much worse.
It was not the first time I flew in a helicopter last year. For the first time, many years ago, I jumped from a helicopter with a parachute, and not very successfully. But flying and taking pictures right from an open window was a new experience for me. Despite some shortcomings and inconveniences, I liked it :)
One of the features of such a shooting is that if the camera does not record the geolocation in the picture or this function is disabled, then exactly where you took this or that shot and what exactly you managed to shoot is often very difficult to say, almost impossible.
Countless rivers, streams, lakes, swamps, forests, hills and mountains will remain nameless for me, the maximum that can be understood is that I photographed them somewhere along the path between the take-off and landing points, and the path does not always lie in a straight line. If we flew over densely populated regions, it would probably be easier to navigate by terrain, settlements and other traces of human activity. But we flew to very sparsely populated and wild places :)
The rivers that are found in the photos in this post are the Seimchan, Yasachnaya and Kolyma, the mountains are the eastern outskirts of the Chersky ridge. Where is which river - it's hard for me to say, if I do not study the map by the millimeter, I can only guess with some degree of probability.
All these shots (except the last two in the post) were taken in the Russian Far East, on the way between the village of Zyryanka, Sakha Republic (Yakutia) and the village of Seimchan, Magadan Region. Look at any map if you are interested in what is around — mountains and foothills, forests and tundra, and small villages scattered there, less often — small towns. Wild places :)
With such shots, it’s just right to ask questions in Where is it Game in Photogames, but I myself don’t know the exact coordinates for the correct answer :)
As for small lakes, swamps and other things on such helicopter shots, it is even more difficult to identify them, at least for me. Feel free to try if you want :)
And here is the helicopter on which we flew — it is huge MI-26. For a better understanding of its scale, the green tent on the right is not an ordinary individual tent, but a collective one, designed for several people (8 of us slept there), in which you can safely stand up to your full height.
It was the first time I flew in such a large helicopter. Yes, and a long expedition was also new to me. But more on that later.
Well, and this is, in fact, the window from which I often leaned out during all the flights and took pictures of the views that I showed today. I think, there will be a few more posts with helicopter views in the future — after all, I flew a lot that year and I managed to photograph a lot of various views :)
It's better to watch photos in high resolution.
OLYMPUS E-M1 Mark II
You can also see my photos in my blog LJ and in my profile on NatGeo. You can read a short interview with me here.
