The Air Races started yesterday so the kids and I took a drive out there today to have lunch with Beth. Thought we would just be there for lunch and leave figuring not much is happening this early in the week, however with the planes and jets up doing practice and qualifying runs today and not much of a crowed it turned out to be a good day to do some shots. With the old prop planes I wanted to work on getting the prop to blur as this makes a much better shot with these planes as when the prop is frozen from using a high shutter speed they look like they are ready to fall from the sky. This shot I was pretty happy with as it was shot at shutter speed 1/100th of a second while hand holding a 500mm lens. Typically you want to shoot with a shutter speed number higher than the focal length number when you hand hold the camera. For example with the 500mm lens you really want to shoot 1/500th or faster but if I do that the plane prop will not blur like I want, so I have to break the rule and lower the shutter speed. Needless to say I deleted A LOT of files after. I came home with 790 shots and have already reduced it down to 207 shots and I will probably eventually delete several more out of that. I was able to play around a bit today and got it figured out that when these old WW2 planes are going full speed I can still get a bit of prob blur at 1/320th increasing the amount of files I will potentially keep. One thing with this picture though is the prop pretty much disappears which may be to do with the way the light was hitting it but I am still pretty happy with how it turned out.
Over the last couple weeks I have been able to capture a few other things that fly other than airplanes. The duck and geese were photographed up by Alturas, Ca at a wildlife viewing area just south of the town. The dragonfly was in our backyard sitting on the top of a tree that I need to pull out and get rid of.
