Erik X said:Thanks Wiebe, I'm kind of grounded these days so my only option is to catch planes when they are diving or turning..
Thanks Graham and Roo for all advices
There are two more airshows here before the season end so I'm going to try Tv mode as you suggest. Then I think I need to spend some time reading the manual 8) Last time I did, I discovered the 'safety shift' mode which more or less revolutionized bird and airshow photography in Av mode. When enabled, the camera steps down ISO temporarily if the shutter speed hits the shortest possible time so that feature saves a lot of overexposed pictures.. But why on earth did the Canon software people chose such a cryptic name?
My main problem is something else, the IS of the EF100-400L2 is simply fantastic.. for seagulls and WW1 fighter planes that is.. But when I track a Spitfire or a jet, the horisontal stabilisation simply quits since it can not handle the yaw rate.. and when the pilot pulls up for a loop, the vertical stabilisation does the sameSo then there is no IS at all.. I wish that the Canon engineers had implemented a low-gain mode instead, which could ignore panning at constant speed and just compensate for shakes. But no.
I have not figured out if the piezo gyros saturate or if the moving lens hits the mechanical stops.. If it is the latter, I guess that IS mode 3 would work better but it seems not..
Anyway, now I'm experimenting with adding 'inertia' to the camera instead; if I have the tripod attached and align the ball joint to 90°, I can have the extended tripod legs resting on my shoulder, that will spread out the mass so I get kind of 'flywheel' action. It seems to work pretty well, the only thing I'm worried about is that I may knock down spectators and photographers standing behind me.. Maybe a red flag at the end of the legs would solve that problem? To be continued..
Anyway, short shutter time allows studies of how smoke puffs form under a Saab Safir. It would not be possible at 1/100s ;D
Hi Erik,
Good luck with your experiments! As for exposure - for bird photography (the other type of birds
) I usually set the camera to full M (only in rare cases with auto-ISO) as there is relatively little variation in lighting conditions of the birds themselves, although the sky (clouds) might have different brightness. It has the advantage of full control over shutter speed and aperture (DoF). That said, I only pan across a small area; I can imagine your type of photography needs much larger "swings" hence more variation in exposure... Care to comment?Whatever your method - your photo's are always perfectly exposed here on the forum! Setting the bar sky high
cheers, Wiebe
P.S.> I can understand your reason to use short shutter speed for the smoke puffs - but subjective - I like the pictures better when the props are blurred at the tips, gives more impression of speed. Nice series again!
Upvote
0
