Taking pictures Aircraft in the Air

[Guest]

Yes I know how you feel Ian & Jeff.

Bit of nostalgia about the little beauty. Got all the gear with it as well. Extenders & a flash unit with all the bits. Hate to think what I spent.

Used to have a dark room as well. 10 hours spent in it for one lousey print. Even model making does not get down to that level. Yet.

Laurie

[Guest]

For an 18-55 that's not bad.

Here's one I took last year. I have to say I am not 100% sure what is going on. It is not a very shallow depth of focus - of that I am sure. It is probably the fastest rolling aircraft in the air and I think this is what is happening. The wing tips move quite quickly and are blurred, but the center of the fuselage moves little so is quite sharp.

[Guest]

as you say the centre is pin sharp, what lens was you using and can you remember what aperture you had it set at?

[Guest]

That's my Canon 300mm F4 lens, F8, 1/350th 100 ISO

[Guest]

hmmmm f8 should be plenty, peculiar.

Sorry im not much of a help this time lol, mine where shot mainly at f6 and didnt get this problem though my shuuter speed was a lot faster to cope with camera shake and a town weight lens.

[Guest]

I say you should just use one of those tasty XL2's you have for your wedding stuff, lock it in 4:3 at 50i fps and just pick some stills out of the video with your imaging software.

At the end of the day you'll still have the video.

Sounds like cheating??? .... yup .. sure is!!!

[Guest]

Problem is Colin with a DV video camera the resolution for stills is not good. The data is saved for video is 5:1.

Closes ups are brilliant & better than, in my opinion, HD which shows pimples & all that not wanted. Mid shots OK. Long shots DV wise are not good. HD stills much better as I think their compression is 2:1 but even then not as good as a still camera. All a matter of storage of so many pictures at 25 pictures a second.

For the DVD library caes & DVD disc front I have to take stills.

Now off to hopefully get this B52.

Laurie

[Guest]

hmmmm f8 should be plenty, peculiar.Sorry im not much of a help this time lol, mine where shot mainly at f6 and didnt get this problem though my shuuter speed was a lot faster to cope with camera shake and a town weight lens.

Unfortunately that is the trade off. If you use a high shutter speed you get a sharp picture with a frozen prop. Two things can help, getting your panning right and taking the picture when the aircraft is not manoeuvring too violently.

[Guest]

Thats quite strange Laurie, i would have though that the stills would have been quite acceptable, especially from such decent Cannon hardware.

I have a miniDv Sharpe that i use on reptile/archaeology field trips (gets banged around a lot so cheap is good) and it gives very impressive still images from the tape for saying it's a cheap bit of kit.

Obviously a still camera is going to be the best result.

when i owned a digital Canon i would use it in sport mode (four rapid successive shots), i'd override the appeture to F6 and let the camera decide the shutter speed, spot metering and auto everything else (white balance etc).

At the end of the day we have software to tidy up the image.

I will say that if i had a serious shoot to undertake i would use my nikon film camera, very forgiving piece of kit and negatives dont wash out to a white pixel, there's always a little detail there to try and grab back (i was running Kodak processing lab equipment back then though)

Main thing is we're all giving good solid advice which unfortunatley could be blown out of the window if the weather decides play silly b****rs

[Guest]

Problem is Colin that your image in DV Video is compressed 5:1. So take 5 blue pixels which have slight variations. The will be stored as the same blue which saves storage space.

Also unless you have film mode there is also a problem. DV is recorded in 25 frames per sec. Infact it is recorded in 50 crazy ? Odd lines are recorded as a separate frame as are even lines. So if you have a movement between an even & odd frame then they do not quite match & you get distortion. You will not see it in motion but in a still you will as you get a degraded picture. Plus with a good still camera you will record at a massive number of pixels compared to a DV Video Camera. All to do with storage volume & collection of data at 25 frames a second.

If you take a frame of a close up shot the picture will not be bad as a lot of pixels are very close in colour. The further away you are the worse it gets as you are dividing the pixels over a larger area ie a pixel may represent for instance a 100 leaves on a tree.

Laurie