Columbia Ice Fields, a Ravens View – Part 3
Funny enough, the one thing I had not considered at all, at the time, was that I needed to direct the pilot in the direction that I thought would give the best vantage point. Then get him to rotate the Jet Ranger with the right orientation, all the while, adjusting your F stop, shutter speed, filters and whatever else the situation required.
The pilot not being a photographer, has no idea what I am looking for and I can’t explain it before seeing it for myself. His concept of what could be so exciting for me at any time during the flight is nonexistent, so this did make it necessary for some fast thinking and communicating on my part. Not my strong suit at this time of the day.
I was feeling overwhelmed by all that was zooming past at a horrendous pace, all of which required spontaneous and automatic reactions coming from a lot of time behind the lens. Well, maybe this was my naive hope pulsing through my brain, along with “this is costing me big bucks and it had better work out in the end”! The stress was a bit intense.
Now that I am on the topic of $$ I wanted to relate something that happened in flight that could have had dire consequences. While on the last leg of the flight descending into a deep valley I could see that the light did not have quite the impact that we had just had an hour ago. Being the kind of photographer that doesn’t put the camera down till the trip is totally over, I continued to point and shoot anyway. The glare was getting stronger on the window and I was forced to extend my lens out the side into the blasting winds. I had been doing this throughout the trip at times without a mishap, until now.
I am using a Lee Filter mount, to support the various ND grad filters I was shooting with. It clips securely on to the end of either of my lens and is easily interchangeable. This is something that was a real bonus on this trip, where everything was changing so quickly. Well as it turns out, not securely enough.
While drawing my lens back into the helicopter just before the final landing manoeuvres, the top of the lens filter caught on the window edge, being just a smallish opening and flipped the mount plus filters out into the distant landscape, never to be seen again. The pilot hearing my expletive, asked what was up? After yelling to him over the cockpit noise that I lost the filters out of the window, his only comment was that we were lucky it did not hit the rear rotor, putting us into a death spiral as a result……with that said, I was happy to be alive, diminishing the loss of the expensive filters as much smaller event in my mind.
The whole trip seemed to whirr by so quickly that I wondered if it had happened at all. Sometimes I feel that I missed a major part of some of my adventures, because they are so photography oriented, parking my eye behind a lens most of the time. And yet I don’t know that I would be inspired to explore many of the distant regions of the world without that photographic motivation.
I guess it balances out in the long run. I am happy to be fortunate enough to be able to see and feel so much of the world that we live in and share some of it with my readers.
