Airshow Photography, Part One: Equipment

OK, well here we go with my advice and opinions based on about 6 years of shooting airshows. This isn’t gospel, and I’m not a professional, so if someone hires you to shoot an event and you screw it up based on this info, tough! But I don’t think you would, anyway :)

The first airshow I went to where I tried seriously to shoot it, I was using a Canon G3 with a teleconverter attachment (which if I remember almost doubled the focal length to approx a 250mm equivalent). The image quality was good by 2003 point’n’shoot standards, but nothing compared to the stuff you can get today. A point’n’shoot has other significant drawbacks for shooting any kind of action too; limited control over manual settings, low usable ISO ranges, slow shot-to-shot time in continuous mode, and worst of all, slow shutter response (aka shutter lag). It’s hard to time a shot when you have to press the shutter about a third of a second before the camera will fire!

Still, even given all that, you can get good images if you apply the basic techniques. Look for wider-field shots that don’t require split-second timing.

Canon G3, 1/1250 f/7.1 ISO 50, 28.8mm. This is still one of my favourite airshow shots!

Canon G3, 1/1250 f/7.1 ISO 50, 28.8mm. This is still one of my favourite airshow shots!

After that I moved up to my first DSLR, the Canon 10D (yeah OK so I’m a Canon loyalist… I dunno why sometimes, I’ve had plenty of problems and I think their QC sucks… but anyway…). I got a comparatively cheap Canon 75-300IS lens for about $300, and got some great shots with it.

Canon 10D, 75-300IS, 1/1000 f/8.0 ISO 200, 300mm

Canon 10D, 75-300IS, 1/1000 f/8.0 ISO 200, 300mm

Generally speaking, SLRs are INFINITELY faster than point-n-shoots, with almost no shutter lag, 3 fps or higher continuous shooting etc. For most people, this is probably where you want to stop spending money. Even these days you’re looking at about $1000 total for this setup, and it takes perfectly good photos. But if you’re an obsessive freak like I am, you have the option of moving on to a higher quality lens like the Canon 100-400L.

Canon 40D, 100-400L, 1/1250 f/5.6 ISO 200, 400mm

Canon 40D, 100-400L, 1/1250 f/5.6 ISO 200, 400mm

All the other pictures in this (and every) post are cropped, resized, post-processed and sharpened. The picture above is completely unprocessed in any way apart from cropping. It’s of an F/A-18F Super Hornet, several hundred feet away, moving at a couple hundred miles per hour, under bad lighting conditions, with the lens wide open (at its widest aperture setting) at maximum telephoto. In other words, this shot was basically taken at all the extremes that guarantee a soft picture; and you can read every word written on the airplane. You need good technique to get a sharp picture, but you also need a great lens to get that kind of quality. It’s not as good as shots from a 500mm prime I saw recently, but then that lens costs around $6000!

So to conclude, the old adage that “it’s not the equipment, it’s the photographer” is largely true, and you can have a lot of fun with a point’n’shoot. Don’t expect to get close-ups without buying the best telephoto lens you can afford for your DSLR though. And even with the right equipment, you need the right knowledge and techniques or your photos won’t turn out as good as they should. More on that in my next post!

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