Some photos you have seen here are taken at 1/60. The spit is lens shake this crop clearly shows it. There is two of everything.

SLR’s can go out to an f-stop of 32 with the correct lens, unlike point and shoots which are often restricted to an f-stop of 8.

As for dust, the spit shot is covered in it.

It’s 1/160th, I would describe it as camera shake – but lens shake is as adequate a description as any. Either way, a faster setting, say 1/250th or even 1/320 or something would help reduce it, at the expense of movement within the propeller arc.

Yep, I agree about the dust, but it’s not present on the Gripen shot, at least not at a normal viewing, so I assume it’s all on the lens, rather than the sensor – but he may have cleaned it.

Tv is shutter priority AE (Auto Exposure), explained on page 82 of the manual (you do have a manual, I hope! I downloaded mine from the Canon web site, as the version I got was in German!)
Tv is one of the settings on the round dial on top of the camera, along with A-DEP, M, Av and P.
You have to go into the menu to set the servo auto-focusing, after pressing the AF part of the 4-way (arrow) button, the one with SET in the centre. This is on page 71 of the manual.
So far I have read the manual about 5 times from cover to cover, but then I am a technical author and write that kind of book!
I must say however that compared to my “old” Minolta Dimage A1 the controls on the Canon are far easier to find and use!

Haha 😀 – a manual? Me? For a Canon? No.

I don’t have a Canon, I have a Fuji Finepix S5600.

But rest assured, should I ever get a Canon, I’ll certainly invest in five minutes to download it. 😉

Try reducing the image size, not the file size to something you can see on the screen – 800x or 1024x width – set up correctly, your image processing software will automatically determine the length – but I crop 800’s to 480, as I have a widescreen monitor. Otherwise I use 1280×768.

Anyway.

Once you’ve done that, try using the sharpening tool – the unsharp mask. This will have the effect of tightening up the images.

Judging by the amount of really great propeller movement you got into the Spitfire picture, you may be using shutter priority set just a little too slowly – use a slightly higher setting until you get better at panning.

Ahh I see that you still have the exif data attached – the shutter is really slow – 1/160 sec – raise it to 1/250th until you get more accomplished, or a longer/better lens.

If your pictures are over exposed, I don’t know how the Canon does it, but at 160th it might not have had the ability to give a high enough F number. On my camera, if it can’t get it high enough, the F number stays red, which means it’s asking me to use a faster shutter speed.

You Gripen photo was much better, and I managed to sharpen it quite nicely:

I don’t see any reason to clean your camera, but there is a smudge on the lens, I think.

Nice photos Gary. Here’s another view of the slightly “scary” Corsair pilot. 😎

Phil

Wasn’t he on Doctor Who?