Nyal Williams wrote:
I can't claim any expertise in this subject and I don't
often take pictures from the cockpit. It is worth
comment, however, that you should have as much optical
zoom as you can find and that you should forget the
digital zoom altogether. The digital zoom is especially
grainy.

This is definitely the case. Digital zoom is worse than useless. It does
nothing that you can't do on your computer after you get home, but it
throws away the rest of the picture and you can't get it back. If you
anticipate wanting to "digitally zoom", then just take the picture at
maximum optical zoom and then crop/enlarge it on your computer afterwards.

One other comment: the optical viewfinder on my Minolta
Z-1 is so grainy and grayed out as to make it useless
in the air, even though it works fine on the ground.
There is no way to find a glider in flight either
with the view finder or the ground glass viewer on
the back.

About a week ago I took a couple of nice air-to-air shots of my club's
Grob 103. Or so I thought. I got home and the Grob was nowhere in sight:
the white shape I had seen on my camera's screen was actually a building.
I haven't done this much, but I have a feeling that reliable air-to-air
pictures require the other glider to be so close that it would be
dangerous without a dedicated cameraman.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software