Plastic Pilot

I don’t know a lot about photography, but I like to fly with good photographers in the right-hand seat. I already mentioned that I had the occasion to fly with a serious amateur photographer. I say amateur only because he’s not working as a photograph, but his knowledge and experience are certainly of professional level.

On that day, he came with a couple of cameras and objectives. He’s photo bag was nearly as big as my flight bag. One of the funny things he was carrying was a “fisheye objective”. This objective has a wide angle lens, and makes possible to take hemispherical images. For “obvious” geometrical and optical reasons, the borders of the image are distorted in a funny way, like if the image was projected on a globe.

For example, it’s possible to make a shot of the whole cockpit of a Cessna 172 TDI. Not only the whole dashboard, but really all of the cockpit.

If you’re not convinced that this requires a particular lens, try making the same with your “standard” compact camera.

You will never achieve to get seats, rudder pedals, dashboard, sunshades and most of the ceiling in the same photo. The distortion can be observes on the right-side door, but it’s not really shocking.

The next picture is a cockpit of PA32-Saratoga, taken from the back seat. The distortion is more visible, particularly in the overhead panel. However this picture also shows all of the cockpit.

The distortion also increases if the photo is taken from a closer position… like the next one, just below the elevator:

Last but not least, a very funny shot of a C172, taken very close to the tail-cone, but nevertheless depicting all the plane, to the wingtips. It simply looks like a toy plane with a big nose !

I like this picture so much that I’m tempted to use it as the base of my new logo… change is in the air…

You can find high resolution version of these pics and much more in this photo gallery.