canadian forces day

[Enforcer57]

You are correct and I couldn't put it any better herr Rattler. Most cameras that cost more than fifty bucks have these functions. They work great on planes, but remember to up the shutter speed to 1/500 if shooting jets, even if they don't appear to be traveling fast. They are. Even the older ones. Also, panning helps keep them from blurring as well. The best way to do this is to face forward with your feet far enough apart to steady yourself, and pivot your upper body as the planes go past. This wya you don't have to reposition your body when shooting, which interrupts the flow. You'd be surprised how far your torso can pivot left and right and how stable it is.

The controls setting such are usually pretty easy to get to so that you can change pretty quickly.

That shot of the Bearcat is a perfect example of why you want to do this. The camera will then automatically control the aperture (F stop or AV mode), and the sky is usually bright enough for it to close down the iris enough (small aperture but a large F stop number-go figure) to keep everything else in focus.

If the auto focus is a bit slow or having trouble focusing, just put that on manual to (usually a switch next to the lens on the front of the camera) and put it to infinity. Works evertyime, since planes are usually well past 50m in front of you.

My new 350$ Cannon S5 is a small camera, but has capability that exceeds my larger Pentax IstD SLR. I can't afford a 1500$ 40D, so this will do.

This shot of lefty gardners P38J and a 51 was at 1/250, and the blades look more blurred because they are at full throttle on take off at Harlengen in 89. (these are tiny files, I can't find the larger files). These are all 35mm iso 400 slide film taken with my old Cannon T-90. Digital is so superior for this stuff.

I used about a 1/2400 shutter speed on this shot, which is as fast as my old Cannon T090 would go. The opposing pass has about a 1000 knt closing speed, and even at this shutter speed, the opposing F-16 is slightly blurred, which gives an effect I actually wanted. At 1/500 the main flight would be clear, but the solo would be totally blurred, hence the high speed. I also used the torso pivot method to catch this, as I put the camera on its max 5 frames per second feed and shot a whole 36 role of slides in just a few seconds as I followed the main flight. I never even saw the solo, and would never have gotten this if I had tried to take just one shot on program mode. still not perfect though.

This works with copters as well, as the 1/250 almost froze the rotors even at its slower speed.

Sometimes you have to go even slower with those things, if they are traveling really slow and close, you can go as low as 1/125, but 250 is probably the best standard. I stll have dust particles on these things. Damn.

Here I did turn it down to

[Crash]

Thanks for the info folks Not long to go before the BIG event

[Enforcer57]

Oops. I think crash replied before I finished posting these shots. Well, for what it's worth, these are some samples of what I was talking about .