I bet you’re regretting posting this right now!!:diablo:

Oh yes! Rather embarassing. Would have regretted it even more if I had gone to the show thinking the weather was not going to be too bad.

However as Sunday evening went on the forecasts became more pessimistic. Finally, by Monday morning the forecast was even worse so I guess they must have looked out of the window at this point.

Cheers to the pilots who flew today in such terrible conditions and to everyone who has posted pics.

Martin

A small but significant change in forecast for Monday

Just saw national BBC weather forecast on TV for Monday. Wet over east England but over far south east, including Southend it might even be dry and bright for much of the morning. Dry perhaps afternoon as well with less/no sun pm but not guaranteed we will escape showers.

Band of rain now mostly forecast to be in central southern England on a diagonal up to East Anglia and breaking up through the day.

There is hope for tomorrow yet but breeze could be a problem.

Hi Gary

Very nice shots here.

Martin

H Steve

Excellent combinaiton!

These are the settings I use on my camera/lens and my advice for ground to air shots:

AI servo (perdictive), max (5ps) continous shooting in RAW mode.
Beware that the max burst in RAW mode is 11 shots in one burst of continuous shooting. After the 11th shot with continuous shooting continuing you will only be able to shoot about one photo a second so do not get too snap happy on one aircraft doing a pass and do not start shooting too early – you may miss the best shot. With slower aircraft there should be no need to take this number of shots anyway. Apart from this, is all too easy to take loads of shots knowing you can delete the less so good images later but it will very quickly take up space on your compact flash.

In practice, if say at Duxford and your taking shots of 7 Spits chasing each other there is usually a small gap between each spit passing which means there is enough time for your camera and compact flash to write down an image before you take a shot or two at the next Spit that passes. This should enable you to take 14 or more shots wihout coming up against the max buffer of 11 shots.

The compact flash I mostly rely on is a Sandisk Extreme 111. This CF card enables your images to be downloaded on you CF card significantly more quickly that a bog standard CF card or an Ultra.

Metering mode is either center weighted or evaluative

Autofocus selection is either centre spot or automatic – I have never been able to decide which is best except for take of and landing shots when I use centre spot in case of background clutter such a trees.

The IS lens should enable you to reduce your shutter speads to at least 100the a sec fo landing and take off shots for a an in focus image – some people can get it even lower. However you can only do this successfully for aircraft wth steady rate of ascent or decent. You will not be able to use such a low shutter speed for an F16 or F15 or any other jet that lunges itself in to the air. These arcraft will still be rotating on take off and the tail and nose of the aircraft will be blurred. I have actually used shutter speed of 800th a sec at ISO200 at RIAT on jets still rotating in the climb from take off.

My shutter speeds/ISO for ground to air should are:

Slow pistons (Old Warden variety) 340th a sec at ISO100
Faster pistons (Spit/Mustang/Sea Fury 400th a sec at ISO100. Poss 500th a sec.
Slow Jets (Sea Hawk and the like) 500th a sec to 800th a sec at ISO100 or 200 *
Fast jets (Typhoon/Tornado) 500th a sec to 1000th a sec at ISO200*

* I vary the shutter spead sometimes depending on the spead of the aircraft at the time. I also use the in between ISOs sometimes such a 125 or 250.

Some people may think that the shutter speeds I quote may be to fast for pistons as they may prefer even more prop blur. However sometimes I like to print an A4 size images and if the shutter spead is too low, a pic showing an aircraft topsiding may have the wing tips blurred due to the up movement of one wing and the down movement of the other wing.

On a dull day I use ISO400 as a last resort and try to lower the shutter speeds instead.

I use standard picture styles on my camera. An explanation of picture styles should be on page 56 of your 30d instruction manual. All of my images nowadays are also post processed.

You can see some of the settings I have used on most of my images on my web sites.

My aplogies if much of the stuff above is what you already know.

Best of luck

Martin

Lovely piccies and planes. All of them and on your other posts. I take it that the next AAD will be in 2008 but is Ysterplatt likely to have an airshow in 2007? I was there in 2003 and it was really great.

Thanks all for your nice words.

Septic. I did get some pics of the F16/Spit combo but not that brilliant.

The topside pic was when they were coming in from the south east and heading toward the center of the croudline. They were quite far away so quite a large crop on that one.

Here they are. Please click on thumbnails.

Regards

Martin

Good pictures P51 for a first full post. I like the F16/Spit combo