Warbird Information Exchange

Hello,

I have been practising some with my Nikon D80. I was just curious what some of the settings you all use while photographing flying aircraft?

Shutter speed, aparture settings, etc?

Also last night there was a beautiful moon out. So I descided to try and get some shots of it. I tried the night portrat mode and night landscape mode to see how each one worked. I probably should have mounted my camera on my tripod.....but out of about 10 shots these were the only ones that turned out ok. I resized them and zoomed in for a closer look using the biult in tools of my D80.

Original shot:


Zoomed in:




Thanks,
Nathan

_________________
Shop the Airplane Bunker At
www.warbirdbunker.com

I use between 1/125 and 1/200 to shoot prop planes. With jets I go to about 1/1000 and above. I get many more jet keepers than props though

F stop does not matter as much as having the right shutter speed.

One from this weekend

1/160 sec, F20, ISO100, 400mm (35mm equiv 640mm)


A moon shot

1/100 sec, F11, ISO100, 400mm x 2 (35mm equiv 1280mm )


Wardie

The general rule is with prop aircraft, where folks like to see some blur in the prop, choose the slowest speed you can hold while panning and get the rest of the aircraft acceptably sharp. "Tack sharp" when shooting a panning aircraft is a myth, all handheld telephoto shots are blurred, so experiment and see where it is still not too blurred for you. For most people that is about 1/500 sec. when using traditional 35mm equipment and a lens in the 400-600mm range, or 1/250 with a steady hand and practice. Same rule applies with a DSLR having a full-frame sensor or one with a smaller sensor and a lens that would be equivalent to the 400-600mm range when correcting for the sensor scale factor. This all assumes that you have no image stabilization. If you have IS that works with panning, 1/125 is probably safe and you might even experiment with 1/60 or slower with practice.

With jets where you don't want any motion blur, the general practice is to shoot at the fastest possible shutter speed to eliminate camera shake blur as much as possible. The only caveat is that lens sharpness and aberration may decline noticeably when it is used wide open, so if you have enough light and you are confident in your panning, you may want to stop down at least one or two stops from wide open.

August

Thanks guys.

Man my moon pic sucks compared to yours.

Great shot!

Is there some kind of adapter I can get to hook my D80 to a telescope? I think its called a "T" mount? Know where I can g et one?

Thanks,
Nathan

_________________
Shop the Airplane Bunker At
www.warbirdbunker.com

Nathan, don't forget depth of field. This is controlled by the aperature of the lens. If you use a higher shutter speed, you will have less depth of field. This is best exemplified in a high shutter speed shot of a person with the background severely blurred to make them stand out. If the lens is "wide open" (low number aperature like f 3.5), you'l have a very short area in focus (limited depth of field).

The problem that you may have is that if you shoot a jet at say 1/2000th of second, you'll have so little depth of field that the cockpit may be blurry, the intakes sharp, and the tail feathers blurry, not what you want. I rarely shoot anything faster than 1/640th of a second, other than crosses with demo teams, which I'll go to 1/1000th.

I had a friend complain that all of his F-15 demo shots had the problem I explained above. I told him to shoot at 1/500th and voila, he was happy with the results.

Rich

_________________
Rich Kolasa
www.crystalgraphix.com

Not an issue during flypasts or demos, and a bit of a myth among aviation photographers. Depth of field does not come into play when shooting a plane at normal airshow distances. If, to take your example, you were using a 600mm f3.5 lens (I don't know anyone using a lens that long and that fast, but Canon has an f4), shooting a jet at the closest permissible airshow distance (for jets) of 1500 feet, your zone of sharpness is a band more than 250 feet wide, possibly more like 350 depending on what you consider acceptable sharpness. Only large airplanes and formations would fall partly outside that range (and then barely noticeably), and for those, you wouldn't need that long of a lens. I have never seen a ground-to-air shot from the normal airshow crowdline where part of the airplane was sharp and part was blurry due to depth-of-field issues; all the ones I've seen as to which this was claimed to be the case were misinterpreted.

If you meant to refer to taxiing shots, depth of field could be an issue. If you use a telephoto to do a close-up of a fighter taxiing toward you 200 feet away, then likely only a slice of the plane will be in focus.

Your friend's problem might have been that his lens was soft around the edges when wide open. All lenses perform best when closed down a few stops.

August