Photographing moving objects

A couple more thoughts (for what they are worth):

1. If your camera has a delay between pressing the shutter button and actually taking the picture (as most non SLR types do while they sort out auto focus and auto exposure etc), try to anticipate the delay. I find that my first few shots at an airshow are usually poor, but then I learn to judge how much “lead time” to give the camera, and things improve – one advantage of digital is that you can screw up any number of shots and then simply delete them! Practice makes perfect!

2. If your camera has a “multi-shot” function try using it – this means keeping you finger on the shutter button and letting the camera take a series of photos rather than just one. Obviously this might increase the chances of getting/keeping the plane in the frame – especially if you “pan” the cmamera at the same time (as mentioned earlier in the thread by Papa Lima). You can then preview the results on site, keep the best one or two and delete the rest. A warning though – this approach can means you can miss a good shot if you choose to review the previous set at the wrong monent 😮 . Memory space may be a problem if the card is small, so you may have to reveiw and delete the bad shots fairly frequently. This approach can also deplete batteries rather quickly 🙁 – so ensure you have a spare set.

3. With a 5MP camera you can afford to leave plenty of room around the subject and then crop the image down afterwards to remove too much empty sky – this means you can afford not to zoom in too closely, which again leaves more room for error in terms of centering the subject at point of exposure. Given earlier comments about your camera this may happen anyway as the maximum zoom is relatively small in 35mm terms.

4. Using a high ISO will force the camera to use higher shutter speeds, and give less blurred images, but unfortunately it also tends to “freeze” propellor and rotor blades (and car wheels), resulting in photos which look odd. Lower shutter speeds help keep blades blurred, and the end image tends to look more “real”. It’s a trade off, and with experience you may find you can use far slower shutter speeds on moving objects than you think – panning means the speed of the object relative to the camera position is much reduced, so slower shutter speeds can still keep the subject sharp, yet blur the background nicely, giving a real impression of speed.

Hope these tips help. The good thing about digital photography is that it does allow you to make and learn from errors without spending masses of cash on D&P costs only to find many of the prints are close to useless 🙂 .

Cheers – happy snapping!

Paul F