I wish to recognize the organizers of WWP Equinox - Don & Landis for all their hard work and patience, and a sincere thanks to all the contributors for their inspiring images and knowledge shared through the WWP forum.

This image is my first attempt at a stitched Aerial Pano. It is composed of 3 horizontal images stitched with PTGUI.

It was rather hazy the morning of March 20, 2004, so I was not sure if I would get the shot I wanted to make. After discussing my idea with the pilot, we came to an agreement that we would do a slow, near-hover as we transitioned the area. Due to the small size of the helicopter, and the fact that we were over water, we decided not to hover and rotate 360 degrees - keeping "saftey first" as our rule.

Shooting digitally with the Fuji S2 I made 3 quick exposures @ 2304 Resolution/Full Quality JPEG - I was not sure if the buffer would handle higher-res images at the burst rate I needed, so I told myself, "this is just a test" and fired away.

A fast shutter speed of 1/3000th cancelled-out the helicopter vibration, but shooting ISO-800 made the images more noisy than I would like...the haze did not help either. I learned quite a bit on this project, and I look forward to applying this new knowledge to future attempts - maybe a 360...

To see more Aerials of NYC click here