I’m not a great photographer, but the compositional skills I learned working in TV do help I’d say.
I use a Canon EOS300, not a top range camera at all but good enough never the less. It has a 75-300mm zoom lens and I also have an 80-200mm and a 28-90mm for wider, closer to subject work. I tend to use the auto focus feature of the above lenses to let me follow and snap the planes without having to try and manually focus as well. This is very useful when you only get a few seconds per plane to get the shot you’re looking for. Slow auto focus is no good, fortunately this feature is fast enough for me on my lenses.
Basically you just need a fast shutter speed to capture planes in flight and freeze their movement. The Canon and many cameras these days have a sport mode on the function dial which does the trick in most cases. I don’t spend a fortune on expensive film either. I use Kodak Gold, or Fuji Superia and nothing else really. Cheap stuff is a waste of time, this stuff is average price.
Normal ISO’s I’d buy would be 100, 200 and 300. In typical Glasgow weather (wet and grey) I use 200, most other times 100 for less grain and only rarely 300 if that’s all I have.
As A330 Crazy knows, a decent scanner is worthwhile for converting the pictures into jpegs for the web. I don’t have a good one, so I get my pictures processed onto CD-ROM at the developers. This let’s me keep the onscreen quality as high as possible. I’ve tried Boots, Jessops, Snappy Snaps and others for these services and find Boots do the best CD’s and Snappy Snaps do the best prints, especially matt ones.
The Boots CD comes with useful additional software for cropping and editing pictures which is handy if you’ve nothing else.
I also use Irfanview software for resizing and sharpening the jpegs which is really good and free as a download from http://www.irfanview.com
Other than that it’s just happy snapping and potluck. Finding a good vantage point away from fences and other obstructions is what it’s all about and the closer you can get to the aircraft the better.
If I was a more serious photographer, I’d have a digital SLR, better faster lenses, photoshop and all the bells and whistles. But I enjoy the challenge of getting nice pics with my “High Street” range of equipment. It’s not that much worse than pro gear, you just have to work a bit harder with it.
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