Got a few more shots today. Nothing major or fancy but a few decent shots. I’ll post some more later.
A USAF Thunderbird circles around on it’s way back to show center. Read more…
Canon Rebel XTi, EF 70-300 IS USM @ 300mm, ISO-200, 1/400th @ f/10
Well yesterday’s plan didn’t work out quite as well as I had hoped. Granted it’s not like I can avoid spraying and praying with a long lens and fast subjects but I had hoped for a better than 0.006 average. I shot nearly 500 frames in the course of something like 2 hours of watching planes fly around and got 2, maybe 3 shots out of that that worked well.
I started approaching this using the sunny-16 rule of thumb i.e. 1/film speed @ f/16 for close exposures on a sunny day. I had to modify that a little to account for hand holding. I needed to be able to hand hold a 300mm (420mm effective) lens so I need a shutter speed of better than 1/400th of a second. So the correction I made was to drop the aperture, from f/16 to f/10 or a net of 1-1/3 stops. That allowed me to open the shutter from 1/200th to 1/500th of a second again 1-1/3 stops.
Unfortunately what I wasn’t expecting was for either Image Stabilizer can actually destabilize a very fast moving pan or more likely the fact that an F-16 can haul more ass than I would want to be on the receiving end of. The net result of those to factors was that the majority of my shots came out far to blurry to be usable. So I’m going to drop another stop of aperture on this from f/10 to f/7.1 and push the shutter up to 1/1000th of a second.
The downside to this is at 1000 feet I’m cutting my depth-of-field in half ( from 2234 ft. to 1160 ft.). The result of this being that I hope the AI tracking for the auto-focus system and the moderately slow ultrasonic-micro-motor in this lens can keep up. Ideally I’d be able to focus at the hyperfocal distance and have everything from ~1500 ft. to infinity in focus but alas I think they are getting closer than that.
The first day of the actual show. Today I tried to catch the USAF’s demonstration team the Thunderbirds. What I learned; the really haul ass and a 1/400th or 1/500th shutter speed just isn’t fast enough to keep up, that or I should have turned the IS system off.
USAF Thunderbird No.6 Rips overhead early in their demonstration.
USAF Thunderbirds No.1 though 4 streak overhead in a diamond formation while maneuvering into position for their next run.
Today makes the pre-show day of the 2007 Air and Sea show in miserable hot sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I happen to be around at the time with a nice new Canon 70-300 IS USM lens and some time to shoot with it so here it goes.
An F-22 Raptor pulls out of a turn.
An F-22 Raptor the newest air superiority fighter in the USAF and a P-51 Mustang the venerable fighter of WW2 fly in formation.
The F-22 and P-51 are joined by an F-15 that just finished it’s solo demonstration for a joint formation display
