Photos Waddington Airshow 2012 (Saturday only)

I've been messing around (as an amateur) with photography for the past couple of years now, only really getting a chance to do stuff when I have spare time.

Anyway, I'm off to Waddington Airshow tomorrow and I was wondering if anyone has any tips for shooting fast moving jets? I've taken photos at airshows before so I kinda know what I'm doing but I'm just wondering if anyone has any tips they could give?

From what I know, the best thing to do is attempt to get an angle that achieves maximum light intake (ie a git sunny bit), use a fast shutter speed and wide aperture and increase the ISO if it gets too dark to use a fast shutter speed. I'll be taking a pretty sturdy and tall tripod with me, also my gorillapod in case I want to try any fancy sh*, anything else that I should be doing/that I'm doing wrong?
Thanks!


Edit: Look further for a brief account of my day and later on for some photos, hopefully they aren't too bad, please feel free to comment (good or bad) on my photos, it'd be much appreciated; I hope you like them!

 

As you saw in the photo a day thread, stonedsurd is the man you want to speak to

 

Thanks I may drop him a pm!

With my previous Air Show photos, I didn't do any post work as I'm pretty n00b with Photoshop at the minute, I used to be a bit better. I'm not really sure how I'd go about editing photos too much, especially of Aircraft. Is it usually a case of editing the levels/curves, contrast and brightness?

 

I'm afraid I can't help you on that front, I don't really have a clue what I'm doing in whatever editing program I use at the moment, I tend to fiddle with settings, and if I like it more I keep it, if I don't like it I undo

 

Haha, that's my method usually too! Although I have done next to no editing on my photos - which is a shame as I think a lot of them could have benefited from post processing - but I don't even have a copy of PS at the moment, I'm afraid I'm not willing to cough up the money for a licence at the moment and last time I tried to get a highly legit download it didn't work!

 

Lightroom is great and very easy to use. It does the majority of core tasks to help improve your photos without going into full editing (photoshop).

Its also really helpful for importing the photos and exporting them how you want.

 

I'd have a look at GIMP if I were you, I recently upgraded to PS6, well, tried to and it all broke, so I just gave up
Now trying the trial of lightroom, which is good enough for most things, if you shoot in RAW (changing exposure, adjusting colour levels, shadows, highlights, blacks, whites bla bla bla )

 

I don't know what lens-body combo you're using but here are the basics.

- Shutter speed should be above 1/800s for jets. Keep the camera steady at your face, swivel at the waist to track them as they're flying.

- Propellers and helicopter rotors look good with a little blur on them. 1/160s is a safe shutter speed to capture some of that motion. But be careful to keep the rest of the aircraft sharp. It's not easy.

- If your camera has exposure bracketing, use it. I usually shoot three-shot bursts 2/3-stops apart. Use your fastest burst speed (most cameras have two burst speeds).

- Aperture is tricky. You might want to stop down for some sharpness, but then you need to make sure your shutter speed remains high enough to freeze fast-moving aircraft. I try to keep ISO as low as possible because my camera (50D) grains up noticeably at 400 and up. I've seen some great shots taken with better bodies (7D and 5D2/5D3) at ISO speeds up to 1600 so depending on what body-lens combo you're using you may or may not have that flexibility. In any case, prioritize shutter speed because you can salvage a noisy image but not a blurred one.

- Shoot RAW.

- Lightroom is a good editing program and it's what I use.

- If you can, carry two bodies. I use a 450D & 17-50mm for static shots on the ground, and a 50D with either 70-200mm x1.4TC or a 100-400L if I can rent it.

Hope that helps, shoot me any specific questions and I'll see if I can answer them.

 

Thanks for the tips! Currently on my way home now, got a good couple hundred of raw photos, I managed to read this just before the display started.

Will fill you all in on the photography dramas I had haha! May also upload a couple of snaps if people were interested... once I've found my cable and the cd for the raw converter software that came with my camera (if I can't find the cd, are there any others that would work?)

My setup at the minute is very basic, it's my first "SLR" - you'll see why that is in quotations when you see what camera it is - I'm using a Samsung NX-5 with their stock 18(?)-55mm and 50-200mm lenses, not exactly ideal for an airshow but it's my first setup and I don't have too much throw at kit at the moment, especially since I'm looking at getting a new pc for uni

 

Fair enough re: equipment.

Look forward to seeing your shots

 

Ok well I've managed to locate my cable and at the moment I can't be bothered to even attempt to do any post-production work so they're going on my flickr without any editing (as is the case with pretty much all of my stuff).

So while everything is being transferred to my pc/uploaded to flickr, I thought it'd be nice to give a little explanation of the day as I thought it would be nice to set the scene etc. I'm going to change the name of the thread to reflect the slight change in topic. (Feel free to just skip the rest of this post as I doubt many people are interested in my ramblings!)


The day started off at 6am when I set off on the 3 hour drive to RAF Waddington, when we got there it was absolutely pee-ing down with rain so it didn't really set the tone well for the day but I remained optimistic as the weather forecast said it was set to change. Luckily enough it did. The day started off with a parachute display from the armed services (RAF I believe?) which was quite a nice opening, with many fast jets following straight after. A few of the RAF's and AAC (Army Air Corps) helicopters broke up the pace, which was a nice addition, as much as I love fast jets. The F-16 and F-18 Hornet followed soon after, giving an ear drum-bursting experience which was absolutely fantastic; I was lucky enough to get a signed poster from the Dutch Airforce pilot who was commanding the F16, such an incredible aircraft and the orange colour was lovely to see. The afternoon was host to the Red Arrows and the Korean, Saudi and other International display teams, all of which demonstrated superb aircraft handling skills and left me in awe (as well of a couple of beers obviously, which I hope isn't shown in my photos!). The day was finished off by a display from the 757 and the King Air... who'd have thought a 757 would be doing 60 degree banks at an airshow... great stuff.

A couple of things hampered my photographing experience, namely not remembering that my dad had borrowed my camera and filled my memory card with loads of pictures and I wasn't sure if he had copied them to his PC or not so did not want to delete them, therefore resulting in me not being able to take many photos (especially since they were in RAW format), so I did not use burst mode for any of the photos, although I think that this benefited me in some ways as I really had to hone my skills in tracking aircaft at 600+ knot airspeeds which is no easy task, especially with only a 200mm lens!!! Another restriction was the fact that I don't have one of the top-range cameras with all the fancy lenses etc and it made viewing my photos on the screen very difficult so it was sometimes a case of shoot and hope. The fact that my face turned to absolute betroot within a couple of hours wasn't exactly a helping factor and my eyes were puffed up to hell with my hayfever, but that's all part of the experience!

Enough of the excuses and blabbering, I'll post a link and/or a few images once these damn things have actually uploaded! - stay tuned if you are interested.

 

Right well after sitting waiting for 2 hours, only for 30 photos to attempt to upload... only one of them actually worked.

Anyone else having trouble with uploading photos to flickr? This is my 3rd attempt tonight

Edit: Here's the spoiler for the only image that actually uploaded, for the moment anyway:


SAM_5867 by Sam Livingston, on Flickr

 

Well after me and flickr have sorted out our differences, I'm currently uploading about 150 photos to my flickr. I've added about 30 so far so here's the link to what's been uploaded as of now.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samlivingston/sets/72157630361659694/

My photos seemed to improve gradually as the day went on so stay tuned for the rest of them!

 

Some pretty decent photos there, would have been nice to see a slower shutter speed to get some blur on the rotors but for a beginner you did well

 

I left a couple of faves and comments over at Flickr.

Gief moar, plz.

 

Thanks guys really appreciate the feedback

Looking back over them, a lot of them are pretty underexposed, I think using a higher ISO would have helped me a bit as I believe the aperture and shutter speed settings were pretty much spot on for most shots, either that or I'll maybe have a look at doing some post-processing.

I agree with you on the point of using a slower shutter speed for the helicopters, only trouble was that it started getting pretty windy, to the point where it was blowing my camera about (and I've only got a 200mm lens!), also, I couldn't really tell too well from my screen what the pictures were coming out like, so in hindsight, I'll definitely try to use a slower shutter next time! Thanks!

I've got about another 50 or so to upload I think, I'm just picking out some of the better ones for Flickr as I think it gets pretty repetitive for a viewer to see pretty much the same photo over and over again.

Thanks! and do you mean give? I'm confused

 

Yes, I meant give.

 

I've hit my maximum uploads for this month (grrr) so this is as many as you'll be able to see till next month, there's about another 70 to come yet though...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samlivingston/sets/72157630361659694/

 

Kick up vibrance and contrast in the Red Arrows shots. You've got some great shots

 

Thanks man, I really appreciate the feedback & tips I'll see if I can get some sort of software sorted and have a play around with the shots at some point, a lot of them have come out under-exposed which is a tad annoying but I should be able to do something since I have the raw files.

How exactly do you go about editing photos with the raw files though?