Page 4: AIRSHOW PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS

(If you're up for buying a new camera to take to your airshow, I'm a particularly big fan of the Panasonic FZ100 and the Canon SX30-IS. If you don't want something that big, a Panasonic FS7 or Canon SX210 should produce good results).

I would recommend against those teleconverters and wide-angle adapters that are available for screwing onto the front of point-and-shoot camera lenses. They make the image really blurry, so you end up capturing less detail than if you just took the picture with the "naked" lens and then later cropped it on your computer (a.k.a. "digital zoom").

Of course, all other things being equal, you're better off if your camera focuses relatively quickly, has a relatively fast (i.e. wide-aperture) lens, has image stabilization, has a relatively sharp lens and a sensor that's not too grainy/noisy, etc etc... but that's always true, not just at airshows. That having been said, most airshows do take place outdoors and during the day, so there's plenty of light. You'll be able to keep your ISO at the minimum setting and your aperture a little narrower than wide-open, so these issues like lens sharpness and sensor grain/noise will have a much smaller impact on your picture quality than if you were shooting with less light (e.g. indoors or in the evening). Your biggest challenges will be getting the airplane in the frame and in good focus, not fidgeting with F-stops (although picking the right exposure setting does help. I'll go over that in a minute).

- 200mm will take barely-acceptable pictures of large formations and of really large aircraft (like bombers, cargo haulers, and commercial airliners). If going to an airshow, I'd say 250mm (such as those 18-250mm lenses that are available) is a minimum.
- 300mm will take acceptable pictures of medium-sized airplanes like F-15s, B-25s, and business jets. You can crop afterwards and get good pictures of smaller airplanes, but they will be grainier and less sharp than they would be if you were not cropping.
- 400mm will take acceptable pictures of small fighters like F-16s and P-51s. You'll probably still end up cropping your pictures of tiny aerobatic airplanes.
- To ensure that you get good pictures even of the tiny aerobatic airplanes, try and get 500mm or more, or a fast-ish 300 or 400 that can be used with a teleconverter.

Most airshow photographers have 400mm lenses. The people with 300mm lenses will, if possible, use a teleconverter when shooting anything except large jets or large formations, and the people with 200mm lenses will use a fast lens and some kind of teleconverter on it pretty much at all times. Quite a few will use a 500mm lens, and you may even spot a 600mm. I myself use a 400mm with a 1.4x teleconverter, i.e. equivalent to 560mm. What that extra focal length does is, it allow you to take pictures of airplanes when they're a little further away, i.e. when they're coming towards you from the end of the runway, not just when they're right on top of you. So it's easier to get head-on shots and other unusual angles, rather than just the relatively boring picture of the side or belly of the airplane as it's going right by you. Longer focal lengths also make it easier to shoot tiny aerobatic airplanes, as well as Remote-Control airplanes and other things you may see.

If you're thinking of maybe getting started with airshow photography (or other photography that involves long lenses, such as bird photography, sports photography, etc), there are some excellent 300mm lenses that are actually pretty cheap. I'd recommend you get started with one of those. Canon has the 75-300 for $130, Nikon has the 70-300 for $150, and other manufacturers have similar offerings. If you think there's a chance you'll get into shooting airplanes, or birds or athletes, then it's probably worth picking one of these up. As with most lenses, you can usually sell them for 95% of their cost anyways, in case you're not happy with the results. It's cheaper than renting! (In all seriousness, as I write this I am in the process of selling a 28-300L on eBay, and I fully expect that I will sell it for 95% of what I paid for it. The net cost of owning this lens for two years will have been less than what it typically costs to rent a nice L lens for two weeks!)

Use center-point focusing! Most cameras look at several spots all over the frame, then tweak the focus a little bit, and sense how much the contrast is going up and down in all those spots, to decide at which focus setting there is most contrast overall (since, when things are in focus, the edges of dark areas get darker and the edges of light areas get darker, since they no longer blur into each other). The problem with this is the following: out-of-focus sky look just like in-focus sky: just blue all over (or grey as the case may be). So if the camera is looking at a bunch of spots on the frame, and one of those spots is on the airplane and all the others are in the sky, the camera will have to tweak the focus for a little while before it realizes that all the sky spots are basically un-focusable, and that the only spots that looks any sharper when you tweak the focus is the spot where the airplane is. This takes a while and is not as precise. So you might as well tell the camera: Hey, the airplane will be in the center of the frame, so just try to sharpen the focus at the center point and ignore everywhere else. Most nicer cameras have a menu setting where you can choose, from a bunch of rectangles, which one(s) the autofocus system should keep an eye on. Just choose the single rectangle closest to the center. (Or, if all your camera can do is "look all over the frame" versus "just focus on the middle" - often indicated by a big circle all over the frame versus a little square near the center - then tell it to just focus on the middle). This will make your autofocus faster and more precise. It will also force you to work harder to keep the airplane on that center spot, which brings us to...

Pan carefully! Those are probably the most important two words on this page. The more smoothly you pan - keeping the airplane in one place in the frame as it flies, instead of wobbling all over the place as you struggle to keep up with its motion - the more sharply it will be focused, the less camera shake there will be, and the more deliberately your shot will be composed. Keeping up with a quick-moving subject by panning well is definitely the most important skill when it comes to shooting airplanes. Some aviation photographers will even go to a nearby small airport or racetrack, to follow Cessnas or cars with their long lenses, to make sure their panning skills don't get too rusty. One excellent way to develop good panning skills, I have found, is to shoot a little video. Most digital cameras can shoot video now, and if yours can't, then maybe your phone can, and failing that, there are lots of cheap camcorders out there. Smoothly moving your whole body so as to keep a moving aircraft right in the middle of the screen is something that takes some practice and some finesse. And don't worry if you struggle with it at first. Most people do. And there are some tricks you can learn, too. For example, you may find yourself pointing your feet towards the direction where the airplane comes from, and then twisting your body more than 90 degrees as the airplane flies past you and away in the opposite direction. It's much easier to point your feet 90 degrees to the airplane's path, so that you're looking slightly to one side as it comes, then looking straight ahead (in the direction your feet are pointing) as it passes, then looking slightly to the other side (rather than twisting drastically) as the the airplane flies away.

Use continuous focusing! When you half-press the shutter button, most cameras will (by default) find something to focus on and then "lock" the autofocus and go "beep beep". From that point on, as long as you're holding down that button, the camera is focused on things a certain distance away; Anything closer or further away will be out of focus. So if you focus on an airplane as it's coming your way, and your camera goes "beep beep"... well, the airplane is getting closer, so it will be out of focus while is passes you, until it's past you and getting far away again. This autofocus mode, where the autofocus locks as soon as it's in focus, is not good for moving subjects! Much better is a mode called "continuous" autofocus, which is often buried in the menus. When you turn on "continuous" autofocus, the camera will continually try to keep the frame in focus. (If you're using center-point autofocus, like I recommended above, then when you put the camera into continuous mode it will always try to keep in focus whatever is right in the middle of the frame, as long as you're half-pressing that shutter button). So as the airplane moves closer and then further away, "continuous" autofocus will try to keep up with it, rather than "resting" as soon as it finds good focus. It's funny how often I'll be at an airshow, and I'll hear the camera of the guy next to me go "beep beep", and I'll say "Hey, are you sure that you want to be in that autofocus mode?", and the guy will look at his settings and his eyes will go wide and he'll say "Ooops! You're right! Thanks!".

Now, you may notice that your camera is struggling to keep the airplane in focus, even though you're following the tips above (center-point focusing, good panning, continuous focusing). A really good SLR will be able to focus on anything; You just point and shoot! But some cheaper SLRs, and most point-and-shoots, have autofocus systems that are simply not fast enough to keep up with small, fast airplanes. And some old cameras have no autofocus at all! If you find yourself in this kind of situation, where the autofocus just can't keep up, what can you do?

The solution I always used was the following: I'd change the camera back from continuous autofocus to single-shot autofocus. Before the airplane made a pass, I'd point the camera at a spot on the runway, approximately underneath the place in the air where the airplane was about to fly through. I would then half-press the shutter button, to lock the autofocus. The camera would focus on that spot on the ground, go "beep-beep", and typically I'd see the little square or circle in the viewfinder change color. I would continue to delicately hold the shutter button half-pressed. When the airplane approached, I would point the camera at it to get it in the frame, then pan along to follow it as it flew... meanwhile keeping that finger half-pressing that shutter button... and then press the button the rest of the way down at the moment when I wanted to take the picture. This is not as great as having autofocus that can continuously follow the airplane as it flies, but hey, not everyone can afford a 1D-series camera ;]

What to do about this? There are two solutions.

One is to simply tell the camera to expose all pictures a little more brightly than it naturally would. This is accomplished by the AV adjustment. Some cameras have it as a dedicated button, some have it buried in the menus. The icon typically looks like a square divided along its diagonal, one half black and one half white, with a little plus sign on one of the diagonal halves and a little minus sign on the other diagonal half. By choosing this option, you will have the chance to move a slider a little to the right of center (expose more brightly) or a little to the left of center (expose more darkly). You probably want two or three clicks to the right. Your mileage may vary, so you'll want to experiment a little bit. For example, for white airplanes (e.g. the Thunderbirds) you won't need to do this at all, but for dark airplanes (e.g. the Patriots or the Blue Angels) you might want to move the slider about three clicks to the right. Again, this will depend on your camera, on how bright the sky is (i.e. you probably won't need to do this if there are dark stormy clouds on their way), and how dark the airplane is (the darker, the more you'll want to over-expose).

The other thing you can do is to tell the camera to do "center-weighed" exposure, or "spot" exposure. Like center-point focusing, this will tell the camera to only pay attention to what's at the very center of the frame, or at least to weigh it more heavily while considering how to expose. If you pan well enough to keep the airplane over the center, and if the airplane is taking up enough of the frame, the camera might expose properly just from that. However, in my experience this is not enough, and you still have to move the AV slider a click or two to the right. But at least you won't get as much variability in your exposure, and you won't have to worry as much about how dark the airplane is versus how bright the sky is.

When shooting jets, you want the fastest shutter speed you can use. This could mean setting your aperture to wide-open, but most photographers find that this leads to a big drop in sharpness, so the typical thing to do is to shoot at about 2/3 of a stop narrower than wide-open. This means that if you have an f5.6 lens, you shoot at about f7.1. And if you have an f4 lens, shoot at about f5. Basically, two clicks down from wide-open. If this leads to unacceptably slow shutter speeds (i.e. you notice a lot of camera-shake blur, no matter how steadily you hold the camera), increase your ISO a little bit. While I try to use ISO 100 as much as possible, many photographers happily use 200 all day, and using 400 on a cloudy day should be acceptable unless your camera is really grainy. In compact cameras (i.e. non-SLRs), it's probably worth it to change your aperture to wide-open before you start increasing the ISO from the minimum setting, since on these cameras, increasing the ISO will be more detrimental to image quality than shooting wide-open. But on an SLR, increasing the ISO should not have a big effect, and using your lens at not-wide-open apertures usually makes it quite a bit sharper, so in SLRs it's better to not shoot wide-open before your ISO is quite high (like 400 or above).

When shooting propeller-driven aircraft, you want to shoot with the slowest shutter speeds you can handle, so that you capture the blurry disc of the propeller blades intead of freezing them into little sticks. That means going as slow as you can, before the whole image is ruined from camera-shake blur. How slow is that? Well, the general rule of thumb is that the slowest speed is your focal length. If you're shooting with a 300mm lens, then the slowest you can safely shoot is 1/300s before the whole thing gets blurry. Shooting with a longer lens, like 500mm, means you should shoot a little faster, i.e. no slower than 1/500s, to minimize camera shake. Now, as with all rules of thumb, your mileage may vary: If you have image stabilization / vibration reduction, then you should be able to beat this rule by a factor of two or so: shoot at 1/150s with your 300mm lens, shoot at 1/250s with your 500mm lens. If you're good at holding your camera steadily - elbows against your chest, viewfinder pressed against your face, fingers gripping the camera gently - then you should be able to go even slower. Helicopters and V-22s, whose rotors spin relatively slowly and need a good fraction of a second to go all the way around, ideally should be shot at about 1/30th of a second, which is easy when they're taking off right in front of you and you can use a 28mm wide-angle lens (but hold on to your hat if you're that close!), not so easy if they're hundreds of feet away and you need to use that big 300mm lens and beat the rule-of-thumb by a factor of ten! Of course, you don't HAVE to shoot that slow. If you can do it, it will make the rotors/props look nice... but if it makes the whole image blurry, then just shoot faster and screw the prop-blur! In general, I find that shooting aerobatic airplanes at 1/400s, warbirds at 1/250s, and rotorcraft at 1/100s, makes for decent prop blur (about half the arc). You'd need to go twice that slow (1/200, 1/125, and 1/50) to get the full disc. Many photographers can do it, but for me it would cause my pictures to almost certainly come out blurry, so I settle for shooting a little faster. (Again, better to get a sharp aircraft without full prop blur than a whole picture that's blurry). You'll have to find for yourself how slow you can go.

If you're exposing completely manually, then you use the appropriate aperture for jets, or the appropriate shutter-speed for props, and then pick the other settings that lead to pretty good exposure. Be mindful of the fact that some directions will be brighter than others (because of where the sun is, because of clouds and their shadows, etc), so you may need to tweak your exposure settings when you shoot in different directions.

If you're using aperture priority (typically for jets) or shutterspeed priority (typically for props), then the camera is choosing the other exposure settings according to what it thinks is a good exposure. But that has its pitfalls. They are described in the section before this one, the "If you're using Automatic Exposure..." section, so do read through that. Basically, the sky is a lot brighter than the airplanes, so the airplanes will come out too dark, so you need to over-expose, either by manually tweaking the AV slider to the right, or by telling the camera to only pay attention to what's at the center of the frame (aircraft) and not the edges (sky) while exposing. You will also need to do this differently depending on whether the aircraft is light-colored (e.g. Thunderbirds) or dark (e.g. Patriots and Blue Angels).

So whether your exposure settings are fully manual, partly automatic, or fully automatic, you'll still need to do some tweaking as you go. Luckily, Photoshop and other tools are good enough that you don't have to get the exposure (or the panning or the focus) EXACTLY right. Below are my post-processing techniques.

Half the work of getting good images of airplanes (or anything else) is post-processing your photographs on the computer using tools like Photoshop or Gimp.

The first step for me is typicallu re-composing. This means (1) rotating the image so that it's at the right angle, e.g. the horizon is horizontal, and then (2) cropping the image so that the aircraft is a little bigger and there's less clutter in the background and around the edges. The rotating part is pretty essential, however cropping should be minimized since it places an upper limit on how large your image can be displayed before the viewer is bothered by the grain and by imperfect focus. Photographs that you see on posters or on magazine covers were probably not cropped.

Then comes time to adjust the exposure. This means you open up the Levels tool, which shows you a histogram (i.e. a brightness distribution). If there's a flat and empty chunk of your histogram on the right side, that means that none of the pixels are very bright (you under-exposed), so you can drag the right-most marker a little to the left so as to brighten up your picture. If there's a flat and empty chunk of your histogram on the left side, that means that none of the pixels are very dark (you over-exposed), so you can drag the left-most marker a little to the right so as to darken up your picture. Finally, if the picture overall is a little too bright or a little too dark, you can drag the middle marker around until things look right: this keeps the brightest pixels and the darkest pixels at the same brightness, but shifts the middle pixels in the distribution so that most of the pixels end up a little brighter or a little darker.

You may now wish to play with the colors. At least open up the Saturation slider and see if the picture looks better if you saturate the colors a little more; you will find that this often helps the picture to look more lively and exciting. (But don't over-do it! If people look orange and vegetation looks bright green, you've gone too far). If your white-balance was off, then your picture may look a little blue-ish or a little yellow-ish, and there should be tools that help you play with the Hue and Temperature so that you can fix this.

If you have noise-removal capabilities, now would be a good time to use them. I use the NeatImage plug-in for Photoshop, but there are others you can use. These tools make your image a lot less grainy, causing it to look much better, especially after you sharpen it and/or enlarge it.

There may be dust on your SLR's sensor, which will cause small dark circles to pepper your image. These are typically most visible in low-contrast areas like the sky, and become more noticeable when you use narrower apertures (such as to achieve the slow shutterspeeds you want when shooting helicopters and prop-driven airplanes). Use the Heal or Clone tool to remove the dust spots.

You may now wish to save your image. This version will be the highest-quality "negative" master file, from which you will edit this picture for future use, such as changing the aspect ratio for a print, or creating a smaller version for the web.

Say you want to create a smaller version for the web. You can start out by cropping a little more if you want, so as to get a desired aspect ratio or just to make the subject a little bigger. You then change the image size so that the image is the correct number of pixels wide/tall to fit in whatever webpage it will be displayed. And as the very last step, you sharpen the image. Sharpening is more effective the smaller the picture is, so the smaller the end-product will be (e.g. an icon or thumbnail), the less it matters that the image was a little blurry because of imperfect panning at slow shutterspeeds and/or a little out-of-focus. So you want to sharpen when the image is at its final size. You can then "Save As", i.e. be sure to not replace your high-quality "negative" master file!

There are all kinds of subtle tweaks you can apply to each of these steps. For example, you may find that sharpening will "bring out" the grain/noise in your image, especially in low contrast areas like the sky. So you may wish to sharpen only the subject, and leave the rest un-sharpened. This can be done in many ways (such as using masks, or copying the picture into a new layer and sharpening it and then erasing all parts of the new layer that are not your subject, thus exposing the non-sharpened background in the lower layers) and also creates a hint of that shallow-depth-of-field effect that most photographers love.

This is just the way that I edit my pictures. Each photographer has a "flow", a preferred set of tools to use and order in which to use them. Similarly to the way that photographers archive their pictures, each individual's editing techniques varies quite a bit. I often change mine after talking with another photographer, as I learn that their technique saves some work or produces slightly better results. So my way of doing it is not THE way of doing it. But it does work pretty well.