Flight over Peterborough County

This August I headed for the open sky for an hour long flight over Peterborough and the surrounding area.  Knowing I could get a few unique photos (unique for me) I brought the Fuji XT2 and two lenses.  The Rokinon 8/2.8 fish eye and the Fuji 50-140/2.8.  The fish eye lens gave the usual fun perspective when on the ground, but when in the sky flying between 2000 – 3500 feet I found the focal length of the telephoto lens (this setup produces a full frame focal length of approx 75-210mm) to be just fine.

One thing to consider (should you go up in a small airplane and bring your camera) is you want a lens or camera that has image stabilization.  I was surprised how difficult it was to hold the camera still while we flew.  The flight had very little turbulence, yet it was still really tough to take pics with a telephoto lens.  I set the camera up to keep the shutter speed around 1/2000 or quicker and had the lenses image stabilization active as well.  I had several images that were blurry, but for the most part the images came out pretty good.   When it comes to the fish eye lens image stabilization isn’t required (due to the small focal length) so the couple of pics I took out the window while flying were perfectly sharp.

Here are a few images of some recognizable locations along with one of my home as we did a flyby.  They are Peterborough Lift Lock, Silver Bean Cafe, Little Lake, Gannon Narrows and the Chemong Lake Causeway.