Have to say, what a bunch of very polite gents they are. Some of the other traders could take a leaf out their book in how they treat their customers!!

I bet they’ve been a bit surprised about how popular they’ve been! They were also being very long-suffering when I saw them at Eastbourne – I think people were bamboozled by the shear range of Canadian Lanc goodies available. Let’s hope they’ve made lots of well-deserved funds to support the tour and their beautiful aircraft!

Was quite pleased with this pic from Duxford today:

IMG_3199 by sboreeves, on Flickr

David Thompson very kindly emailed me a lot of his photos of the engine swap over – I’ll put a few selected images below and you can see all of them here.

All Credit to David for his Pictures – I’m just hosting them for him….

Hi Alan,

I wrote a bit about this in another thread but here’s a few thoughts on the matter.

Firstly, your camera has a built-in light meter so that’s why (as Bruggen 130 says) you just have to compensate by + 1 or 2 stops – i.e. you’re telling your camera that you want to expose your shots that bit lighter than the built-in light meter is suggesting. Check your manual because there’s probably a setting where you can change how the light meter works: at a guess, at the moment it’s using an average across the whole image which means that the large bright area around the aircraft is causing it to under expose.

With the argument about shutter/vs aperture, here’s my thinking:

1. with prop aircraft you want to get some prop blur so the only way of ensuring this is to control the shutter speed. Listen to the engine note, learn which aircraft had fast/slow-spinning engines and choose a shutter speed which maximises clarity (i.e. fast enough) but also gives you some prop blur (i.e. slow enough). Experimenting is the only way but you’ll probably need something between 1/180 and 1/500. with a bit of practise you can review your images immediately after you shoot them, decide if you’ve got the right setting and then crank the shutter speed one way or another.

2. With helicopters, the same applies but you’ll probably need slower shutter speeds as the rotors spin more slowly. Thankfully helicopters tend to move more slowly so you can still achieve sharpness.

3. with non prop aircraft against the sky, (i.e. no close background) you can switch to aperture priority and choose a wide aperture (low number) which gives a nice fast shutter speed and crisp image but also keeps the whole aircraft in focus. As a rule of thumb the more zoomed in you are (and the longer lens you’ve got on your camera) the more pronounced the effect.

4. If you’re photographing aircraft against a background (e.g. when taking off/landing or a low pass) then switch back to shutter priority and follow the aircraft as you’ll probably want to get some background blur.

Always choose the ISO (ASA in old language) which will enable you to get an usable value for the non-prioritised setting e.g. as light fades and you want to close the aperture to increase depth of field or speed up the shutter to increase sharpness, you’ll find that the non-prioritised value maxes out to a point where the camera can’t cope and you’ll get an under-exposed image. The problem with increased ISO is that in effect you’re asking the camera to amplify the signal from the sensor so it’ll get more noisy (i.e. the colours will begin to look like they’ve got a badly-tuned in analogue TV signal super-imposed over them and they’ll be less faithful to the original) and if you’re thinking of doing any image processing then the lower the ISO the better…

The other thing that’ll help a great deal is to shoot in RAW and not be afraid of improving your images in Photoshop. One thing that has made a big difference in my pictures is the ability to boost the detail in shadows, thus your under-exposed aircraft can be fixed.

Above all else just keep experimenting because it’s FREE!

Hi

I rarely post here (just noted – this is my first post!), but enjoy reading most of what appears.

I was also at Little Gransden yesterday… I have put a few shots

The Vulcan was great. Just as it came in my wife asked “what is a Vulcan?”, I told her she would soon find out. When it roared she nearly jumped out of her skin!

Hi Stephen,

Congrats on the first post 😉

Thanks for sharing your photos, I really like the first one of the Canadian Lanc (https://flic.kr/p/oS6Kq7) and the two Lancs against the clouds (https://flic.kr/p/oU6Bmq).

I was there with my 6 year old nephew who hadn’t seen the Vulcan before and he had much the same reaction to your wife. An experience not easily forgotten, eh?

Cheers for now..

Here you go..

Hah – beat me to it!

The Spartans are my other half’s favourite aircraft and I can see what she means. Sadly their beautiful shiny livery shows up all the shortcomings in my photographic equipment so I wasn’t all that pleased with my photos. However, these ones weren’t too bad after a brief spell in Photoshop.

IMG_1582 by sboreeves, on Flickr

IMG_1576 by sboreeves, on Flickr

IMG_1571 by sboreeves, on Flickr

IMG_1573 by sboreeves, on Flickr

IMG_1566 by sboreeves, on Flickr

IMG_1564 by sboreeves, on Flickr