I’m a photographer, not just an aviation photographer so the 70-200 gives you so much more. I use it for all sorts of photography as I’m not shooting stuff thats miles away.
I use the 17-55 for landscapes.

The 100-400 is used for most Aviation shots on the 30D. I keep the 350D and 70-200 handy for A346’s 😉

The extra stops down to F2.8 allow my football shots to have the DoF required at higher shutter speeds and lower ISO’s.
I might aswell stay at home if I wanted to shoot low light/evening games with the 100-400.
Thats why the 300 and 400 primes F2.8 are so expensive! Great pieces of kit.

For Aviation stuff you don’t want the F2.8 setting anyway as your mainly aiming to shoot F8-11.
If your just shooting Aviation then the kit you have will be more than enough. You’ll see a lot of my a.net images are on the 350D with 70-300, 70-200 and 100-400.

I had the 70-300 IS on the 350D as my first digital set-up, which is a good light weight lens on that camera. However since moving to L I’ll never look back.
The 70-200 IS L F2.8 is just superb! I picked up a rare second hand one for a bargain price! If you whack a photo taken with the 100-400 with 500,0.2,0 you may need to add more, add the same to the 70-200 and its way oversharp! I checked your site, I agree the images are not as sharp as on here. Contrast and colours need sorting out though, but I’m sure thats just an editing feature rather than a camera/lens function.

Alex

Oh right Canon, good lad. I have the same lens and camera, although I shoot on the 30D mostly.

The reason I ask was those images look way to oversharp. Not sure if this is due to re-sizing though?

I tend to de-select the sky and dup layer then whack a 500,0.2,0 then rub out or add spots more with the eraser/sharpen tools.

Don’t worry about a.net, I’ve had 5 straight rejections this week! nevermind its only a website.

Look like some cracking photos, not blurry and in focus. So seriously, practise a workflow, keep at it and the pics will become so much better as as your original capture will allow that!

Don’t bother with RAW + JPG, I just use RAW, edit in RAWshooter first then open in CS2 for the levelling, crop and sharpening.

Have a good at those settings I mentioned and re-post.

Paul
I’m at work at the moment so don’t have CS2 open in front of, but I can outline the basics now and then try and fill in more detail later.
Took me a while to get this down but once you practise its 2nd nature.
The key is open your image. The make a duplicate layer then Equalise the duplicate layer. You will see the whole pic change and hopefully the dust spots will jump out at you.
In the Layers pallette you will see your original layer with a thumbnail that looks like the original and the dup layer looking like an equalised version.
Now select the original layer in the layers pallete, it will become highlighted. you won’t see any change to how your viewing the pic on the screen, as you will still see the equalised.
THIS IS IMPORTANT! cos if you don’t work the original layer as you will see later you will delete all your changes if you work on the dup layer.
OK so with the original layer selected, now select the spot heal tool. (ensure caps lock is off!)
You will see that the tool should be a circle and you can change the size of the circle at the top left of the screen.
So now pick a dust spot to attack! Drag the tool next to the dustspot and press and hold ALT, you will see the tool change to with + sign in the middle. Click on a piece of sky next to the dustspot that has similar colours to the dustspot you want to cover. release ALT now.
Now click on the dust spot and your done! Don’t panic at this point as the dustspot you have just clicked on hasn’t disappeared, it will do!
Now go and delete the duplicate layer.
Equalise the original layer again and you should hopefully find the dust spot has gone?

OK thats just a quick 5 mins, dunno if it makes sense but have a play and ask more questions, I’ll check this thread later tonight when I am home.

looks very sleak in a “grey way”