Crop Dusting Chopper

Late in July, crop dusting planes and choppers were flying the corn fields spraying for bugs and I was lucky to catch this chopper close to home. Last year I photographed a plane so I was excited to have something new to snap some images on. I didn't realize that the choppers tanker was just up the road from the house either so that offered some good images too.

Needing to zoom in on the chopper, I used my 70-300mm lense on the Nikon D90 and most of the time for these images had it above 200mm. To get sharp images, I used AV Mode and quick ISO adjustments to keep the shutter speed high to freeze the movement of the chopper. I also used selected focus point because sometimes I had the chopper in the left or right side of the image so I wanted to control were the camera was focusing in on. I do wish the sky and sun would of been more favorable but a photographer cannot control that.

These images are actually jpeg's out of the camera instead of my usual RAW files so I had less amount of post processing involved. I did adjust them in ViewNX and added some sharpness and contrast too them. I then opened up the jpeg's in PSE8 and used Action Curves with Layer Marks, Levels and a few other adjustments to adjust the final color to my liking. I also cropped the images if needed to get rid of unwanted things in the image.

Hopefully for my next update I will be starting to have images from hunting, harvest, antumn and the golf course as we are entering the favorite time of the year for me, Fall. Recently I went over 10,000 clicks on my Nikon D90 so I hope to continue to improve and capture what I get to see in the great outdoors.

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