What to do on a cold Melbourne Saturday night over the Queen’s Birthday long weekend? Fly a helicopter around your lounge room and take long exposure photos of it of course! I’d never used “bulb” mode on my 7D before and after a few test shots to establish some basic settings I was ready to go. The set up consisted of my Canon 7D on a tripod in the corner of the room with a 10-22mm wide angle lens connected to my laptop running EOS Utility in order for me to open & close the shutter (I didn’t have a simple remote to do this), the helicopter at half throttle on the stool in the middle of the photos and its remote sitting in my lap.

I wanted to make the environment visible but not to the point where it would detract from the light trails the helicopter left so I left my 50″ TV (to the right of the photos) on at half brightness to provide a dull light source and add some character. The actual settings for each photo varies slightly and I even experimented using a Neutral Density filter at some stage but generally it was around the following: 14mm, f22, ISO 400, 40 seconds

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