Southport Pics

got some good stuff there myself this year , the light and weather were superb compared to previous years

i shoot on nikon gear and use fully manual on a 70-300mm

quality very much depended where the shooting ops were anything to the left was pretty hopeless as it was washed out by the suns position ( as you will notice on your own collection of shots , all those that you have shot that are to the right of you deffinateley have the edge on those comming from the left )

but anything from the right or directly in front was superbly lit

i managed to get the tornado as it pulled up with the rainbow haze of mist around it , some got it a lot better ( i suspect with a lot more expensive gear than i !! )

but i picked up details like the wingwalkers wearing adidas trainers and the spitfire pilots hand and thumb on the control columb , so good enough for me

i also under exposed a tad to saturate colour and improve detail giving a more contasty look

i shot the day by metering off the sand then underexposing by a couple of stops

i will be posting a couple once i load photoshop onto the new pc set up

but for now i’ll just give a wee sample of a totaly unedited from camera shot

a big secret is using as fast shutter speeds as possible a good rule of thumb is shutter speeds above 400th sec in your lenses case ( i go well above unless wanting prop or rotorblade motion ) with the movement of a long focal leangth lens motion is amplified so even with seemingly fast shutter speeds you will still get blurred images

apart from helis i shot mostly over 1000 sec and even at those speeds some of the tornado shots were still blurred

i focus manualy because i find auto is too unreliable and i miss more good shot ops that i would have been happy with slightly blurred because the shutter did not fire because the autofocus was still hunting

These pictures look really good to me. Personally I think the Photoshop thingy can be overdone and photos end up looking unreal, like the sharpness is overdone as is the colouring. Personally I just use Photoshop as I used to do in a darkroom, just a bit of cropping and exposure amendments. But then I’m a little old fashioned, I’d prefer, as I have in the past, to get the images right off the camera – that’s part of the craft of photography.

Regards

From a member of the ‘dirty lens’ club
Have a read of this. Post #15 tells you his method.

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=52341

Just for interest here is one of mine using similar equipment to yours.
(canon 350D and 100/400 IS)
Speed 1/1500, aperture f5.6, focal length set to 400 – probably the ‘worst case’ for the lens. These have been cut down to 800 pixels wide from 3500.

One thing that never gets mentioned is the quality and amount (i.e. distance) of the air you are looking through. This was taken on a ‘gin clear’ day at Duxford.

Full frame

Cropped

For propellor a/c you will just have to accept that many will have some ‘jitter’.
The Spitfire in my post about Beachy Head was the only acceptable one from six.

Finally practise, practise and practise.

Hope this is of some help

John

From a member of the ‘dirty lens’ club
Have a read of this. Post #15 tells you his method.

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=52341

Just for interest here is one of mine using similar equipment to yours.
(canon 350D and 100/400 IS)
Speed 1/1500, aperture f5.6, focal length set to 400 – probably the ‘worst case’ for the lens. These have been cut down to 800 pixels wide from 3500.

One thing that never gets mentioned is the quality and amount (i.e. distance) of the air you are looking through. This was taken on a ‘gin clear’ day at Duxford.

Full frame

Cropped

Hope this is of some help

John

Very nice pix but I understand you want to get the best out of them.
From my experience using the 100-400, it’s very soft at 400mm so a little heavier sharpening in Photoshop would help. As for the speed, I would suggest going at least 1/640 – taking the 1.6 crop factor into account, your 400 should be considered as a 640mm.

my problem is that they are never as PIN SHARP as the usual images posted on here, Am i expexcting too much of my equipment ? or do you chaps have any tips I could try to get sharper images?

Very good photos 🙂

They look pretty good to me. Nice pictures

Sq