Kev, you’ve got a really good camera in the 450D – nothing wrong with it for aviation photography at all. The camera and lens you’ve got are ideal for air show static displays, and museums. With the lens you’ve got – again, nothing wrong with it – you are going to be primarily shooting ground shots as you will need a longer (telephoto) lens for flying aircraft at airshows and airports. If you do try shooting things further away (flying etc) then you are going to be getting some pictures of the proverbial minute aeroplanes you remember from times past.
My first piece of advice would therefore be – starting out, stick to the things the camera and lens are good at, which means ground shots in museums and airshows. The great thing is that digital imagery is largely free of charge, so you can experiment with the camera and bin any duffers without having the costs of developing and printing. That brings me to another thing – all of us take duff pictures from time to time (even the best photographers), but we just don’t show our bad pictures off!
My second piece of advice would be – try to learn a little about the camera, and photography. Read and understand the manual, and maybe get a book on general photography to try to learn about things like the affects of and the relationship between shutter speed, aperture, ISO settings, depth of field – and how they affect things like action photography, blurred props, etc. (my appologies if you already have a good understanding of all of this). If you do this, sooner or later you’ll be moving the camera off of the “full auto” (green box) setting and will start playing with it in modes like Av and Tv, etc. That’s no bad thing, particularly once you understand what changing these settings involves and will result in. It also won’t do any harm to start to get an appreciation of processing images on a computer either, as almost all digital pictures you see on these forums, on the internet in general, and in print these days will have had some degree of computer post-processing done on them (think of computer post-processing as a digital darkroom).
Finally, I will revert back to something I mentioned earlier. If you want to shoot flying displays or other flying subjects, sooner or later you will need another (telephoto) lens, probably a telephoto zoom. But for now, try to stick to what the camera and lens does best, and as you experiment more and more you might start to find the lens limiting – that’s when its time to consider a second lens. Above all enjoy photography – remember digital is cheaper and quicker than prints, and you DON’T have to show off you duffers unless you want some feedback on what went wrong!
Andy
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