In my experience there is a particular art in photographing airborne helicopters which requires the photographer to balance the need to achieve sharp images of the fuselage whilst allowing a measure of blur of the rotors to convey the impression of flight. I make no claim as to having mastered this art.

I believe this image of a helicopter that was photographing the yachts in the race achieves a reasonable balance between hull sharpness and rotor blade blur and was achieved more by luck than careful planning on my part. In all, I only captured three shots and have chosen this one because it alone shows the illumination of the strobe light on the top of the helicopters tail fin. In none of my images can I see any of the helicopter’s ownership or registration markings.

I captured the image using my Canon EOS 5D Mk IV DSLR camera attached to a Canon EF 100-400 L series zoom lens. Settings were Aperture f10, shutter speed 1/400th of a second, ISO 160 and lens focal length 400 mm.