Mr. Laforet combats this problem in two ways. He sets the camera on a gyroscopic mount, a rig that he holds in two hands and that uses spinning discs to dampen rotor vibrations.

The other thing he does is take a lot of pictures, several thousand an hour, according to an exacting process. Before the flight, he decides on a few main shots he’d like to capture. That allows the pilots to draw a rough flight plan and get any clearances they need. The San Francisco images, for example, were shot from three primary locations above the city, at two altitudes, around 500 feet and around 7,500 feet. The higher elevation is unusual for helicopters, so the pilots on our flight needed to request clearance from San Francisco air traffic control. Then, at each location, Mr. Laforet instructs the pilots to make many passes of the skyline so that he can take pictures from slightly different heights and distances and with different cameras and lenses.

The shots in the set were taken with three cameras: An 18-megapixel Canon EOS 1DX, a prototype 50-megapixel Canon 5DS, and a 50-megapixel Phase One medium-format camera. After the flight, Mr. Laforet spent several hours looking through the photos for the best 100 or so, and then he further culled the list to a handful. These have been altered in two ways, in addition to reducing photographic noise, he has adjusted the overall light levels, including altering the color temperature to emphasize the blue lighting in the images over the orange lights. He has not cropped or retouched any of the images.