aerial photography

[onjeffriv]

I like to take aerial photos from hot air balloons and powered parachute,some I enlarge to 16X20. I am currently using a nikon N65. Want to go digital. I am guessing I will need around 8 mp to get 16X20's but I was wondering about the vibration of a powered parachute and the airspeed ( about 30 mph). Most shots will be with around a 200mm lense or less. I have heard digital cameras are more prone to blur. Any suggestions?
Scott

[D70FAN]

I like to take aerial photos from hot air balloons and powered parachute,some I enlarge to 16X20. I am currently using a nikon N65. Want to go digital. I am guessing I will need around 8 mp to get 16X20's but I was wondering about the vibration of a powered parachute and the airspeed ( about 30 mph). Most shots will be with around a 200mm lense or less. I have heard digital cameras are more prone to blur. Any suggestions?
Scott

Actually to shoot 16 x 20 optimized to 300 dpi will require 4800 x 6000 or about 28.8MP. If you already have a 4 x 6 medium format camera the digital back will only set you back about $30,000. Luckily you can save about $29,000 by sharpening the original in PS and upsample a 6 or 8MP (doesn't make much difference at 16 x 20) image to 300 dpi and it will turn out fine (as long as you don't get super close). I print 13 x 19 all the time with 6MP and they turn out great.

Digital cameras are not anymore prone to motion blur than film. In fact you can change a dSLR's ISO shot-to-shot to help greatly minimize the possibility. Not so on a film camera. Since I'm assuming that most of these shots will be daylight, I'm not sure that keeping the shutter speed above 1/200 sec will present a problem.

Since you have Nikon lenses already the D50 would probably work just fine.