Gareth, the quality of your pics is stunning. If thats a 300mm lens after cropping then it speaks lots for the idea of a fixed focal length lens and crop for effect versus such zoom beasts as £1000 of 100-400 IS Canon. What shutter speed was the red nosed spitty, and what digital crop factor are you getting. My 20D is 1.6 so with a 300mm lens thats an effective 480mm and so for no camera shake it requires 1/500 and that kills blade blur. So how is it done ? Is it that the lens has Image Stabiliser and that is enough to drop the shutter speed for that lovely prop blur yet kill any hand shake ?

Also lighting is absolutely spot on, I used to meter on an average scene (grass), then set that manually, else one second a spitfire and sky prompts one setting then a B17 hogging the viewfinder prompts another one, yet we all know the incident light is what to use. Changing light on the aircraft during a fly by caused problems though. That was in the days of my 35mm SLR, is that still the best way with DSLR ? Again what method do you use ? Have you been tweaking much the raw files for shadow detail and levels in post processing, adding usm etc ?

DBenz