Couple of weekends ago, I spend two very hot and sunny days at a small, private airfield close to Warsaw. It is a place where air picnic “Goraszka” is organized for last 15 years. It was my first time here, in Poland, and fourth air show overall. After great disappointment after last years’ Airventure, photographically, I must have learned some, because I am quite happy with my images this time. And I wrote down few lessons for the future reference.

1) Airplanes don’t look very attractive from far away. Just look at the two images of glider Solo Fox and see, which one you like more. The glider started the show far above, and was lowering its position during the program, enabling me to take better shots.

In my case, 18-200 mm lens was the only choice I had, and I felt it was not enough. I not only looked funny with this lens on the press podium, where the least “pro-looking” guys had 70-300 mm (or whatever Canon equivalent is). But I also think I could have used those 300 mm to sometimes look through the windshield to see pilots face. And 300 mm would be enough, too. Because on the other hand, filling the frame too much often results in missing pieces of the subject .

2) Airplanes look better when propeller, if any, is shown in movement. Just look at the difference the moving rotor and the propeller makes between those two images of Xenon gyroplane.

It is good to have a basic knowledge of planes or somebody knowledgable with you. I had at least three people in my company constantly whispering – 1/250 for this one, and you are safe with 1/500 for this one, no propeller there. Or you can just make a few tries to see what works and what doesn’t. You just need to remember about the effect. And use Shutter priority mode on the camera.
But…. 1/250 sec is not a fast enough shutter speed for 200 mm, especially if you don’t have a steady hand.

3) Turn on the burst mode, and just shoot as many images as you/your camera/your card can. According to Scott Kelby’s theory, something in the middle will come sharp. Or sharp enough. At the same time, you have a chance of catching the most interesting moment in the sequence of the events. Or just ensure a better composition or cleaner background, as you can see at the two consecutively shot images of landing CSS-13 Kukuruznik.

4) Train your panning technique. With airplane moving fast in front of you, and rather slow shutter speed, you are introducing additional movement with panning, which can result in blurry image. And good panning will give you an interesting photo, like this one of TS-8 Bies over Goraszka airfield.

5) Airplanes look most interesting when photographed from above and from up front. Obviously. Those are hardest to achieve when you watch the show happening in the air from the earth. But see for yourself the difference between those two shots of the most interesting aircraft of this year Goraszka air show- newly restored LIM-2.

6) The continuous focus is probably your best friend in many air show situations. Although it is not perfect, and will be sliding all over the sky, it will often help getting sharper images, especially combined with burst mode. After all, there are fast moving planes in front of you.

7) With shutter speed limited by propeller movement anyway, you can go up with your aperture. I was using the medium apertures from f/7.1 to f/16, hoping to get better depth of field which would help hiding imprecision of continuos focus. Or situation like in the first shot here, where the other plane came out soft in the common flight of Spitfire and Hurricane.

As you can see from the sample images, I made all the mistakes I could, but I learned and trained it all at the same time. I am sure next air show will give me maybe less then almost four thousnad pictures, and hopefully more than 67 great keepers.

Everybody taking photographs took at least once a night photograph of the cars leaving a light trail. But you can do it with airplanes, as well, and the result is not less stunning. Last weekend, we took the camera, and went to local airport around the time of the largest evening traffic. There was maybe 6 planes arriving and one plane taking off (hey, it was Saturday evening, Iowa ), just enough to have time for some trial and error and a keeper. I know now what I want to do different next time, but I still like this best image from that evening.

We went to our favorite small airport to do some flying yesterday, but the weather was not exactly perfect for cross-country. Not risking getting stuck in middle-of-nowhere, Iowa for undetermined amount of time, we turned around and decided to spend the midday photographic planes rather then flying them. More fun for me, if anybody asks . We saw somewhere around the net the HDR gallery for planes, and wanted to give it a try. Again, we disagreed on the post-processing and artistic concept of the project . Tomasz liked more hard-core HDR, which are a bit too much for me. So I ended up processing resulting 12 Citabria and 19 Cherokee images in two ways, and then finishing them off with two different concepts in mind. But I have to admit, having a lot of time, a lot of point-of-views, made the project so much fun! And why not black-and-white or selective colors? Especially if the yellow plane is competing for attention with yellow grass (man, I really did not notice it until I had final processed images on the screen!). Check it out.

There seem to be one thing I can photograph with Lensbaby- airplanes. That probably has something to do with my favorite subjects vs technical limitations. Somehow, the landscapes do not look that appealing when I photograph them with Lensbaby, and airplanes are just about the only “solid” item I tend to photograph. Probably because Tomasz is fascinated with flying, and we are spending more time on assorted flying events then foe example car events.
In either case- the blog photo I took last weekend during Pumpkin Splat on Green Castle airfield. Looks like a have a theme this week .

Last week, we have been flying back here from Europe. It was an atypical flight, unusually late for flying West. We departed Poland about 5 pm, and we could see the sun setting in front of us. It stayed this way most of the trip! It was beautiful. An shaky, because of the weather, but very “landscape flight” nevertheless. At one point, when I was so upset with turbulence and couldn’t sleep anymore, I looked through the window and saw this view. I am not 100% sure it is Greenland, but it is my best bet. I used two iPhone apps to work it up, first Photogene to do some typical, Lightroom like adjustments of Exposure, Colors, Sharpness, and then- CameraKit to add watermark, before adding image to my draft in WordPress app .

I prefer to take put my Lensbaby for photographing objects rather then landscape. If I want to play with this lens, I would go places like museums. Or car shows. Or airfields. Somewhere with a lot of detail. As I new I have nothing worth displaying this Lensbaby Wednesday in archive, visiting the Antique Airfield in Southern Iowa was very good choice. This time I remembered that it doesn’t matter what I feel artistically, the propeller and front of the plane needs to be in focus!

It used to be Tomasz guest Saturday, but he seems to be too busy with his flying to care to photograph, and to post. If you are interested in his pilot’s endeavors, you can check his blog here. Luckily, I have some of his photos in my Lightroom catalog, and I want to go back to how the the series started and just post them in his name . This image was taken when we visited Iowa State Fair a couple of week ago. He was trying for a while to achieve the effect that you can see the little blur on windmill wing, showing it is moving. It seems like there is some of it on the photo, and a small plane adds interest to the photograph.

I took this photo while spending couple of hours with my brother at the local airport. Mind you, ‘the airport’ in this case is a little bit of overstatement, but it has some hangars and a runway .

What is interesting in this photo is the light on top of the tail fin. It’s strobe. Very bright and very fast strobe. It blinks about 5 times per second with 2-3 seconds between series of blinks. This one was the very first time I was was able to caught it on picture, ever.

Plus if you look closer you’ll see that my brother (who was at the controls) was actually flying at this moment about six inches above the ground.

I am starting another series on blog- Lensbaby Wednesday. I was using it recently as a lens of choice, to do something different then straight shots in places I am familiar with and felt I might have problems with ideas. Or, like during AirVenture, Tomasz was shooting a lot, and I didn’t want to repeat same shots (it is hard to differently interpret an airshow!). In any case, I have some images I like, and want to share them.
This is one of my all-event favorites from Oshkosh. We went one morning to sea base, and I noticed this yellow Husky and its reflection in the water. When I photographed it, a lady approached me, and decided she like the view as well .

I am still rethinking this post. Since I got the idea of putting together this gallery for my Gallery Monday (and the images were shot with the idea in mind already), I was listening few podcasts about HDR imaging and got second thoughts on it. And although the images in the gallery are not incredibly unique, and don’t think there is anything wrong with a composition or thought behind them. HDR here was not supposed to be “unsuck filter” . There are probably more on utilitarian side, then fine art, thought. For me, it included some technical exercise. I used bracketing in my D300 to make HDRs, the fisheye lens, to capture the whole room in one photograph, and then of course Photomatix to get the final images. So, enjoy your virtual trip to AirVenture museum, when you click on the cockpit photo. The blog image, however, was taken outside the museum, on the AirVenture grounds, inside the DC-3 Dakota.