Attached are a small handful of the photos I took at this past weekend's air show in Binghamton, NY.
Unlike bjsmith, I didn't have the luxury of a show by the Thunderbirds or Blue Angels - we didn't have any of the formation-flying military demonstration teams, just single-aircraft capability demonstrations from an F/A-18 and an f-15 (and "Heritage Flights" where each was paired with a WWII warbird).
I just got finished weeding out all the duds - at an airshow, one needs to take a LOT of pictures because there WILL be duds, airshows are an extremely harsh environment, especially when the sun keeps coming in and out of the clouds, which makes it very hard to do the "meter on the grass" trick because the exposure keeps changing. In general, I chose "link AE point with AF" in my K10D's custom menu and set exposure to +1, that seemed to work in most situations. Unlike bjsmith, I was using program mode with the "High Speed" program line chosen in the custom menu for most of my shots.
I'm using the same lens as bjsmith, the DA 50-200, but I'm using a K10D and he was using a K100D for his airshow shots.
Even with some agressive review-delete cycles of "duds", I still ran out of space on my memory card and its backup (4GB SDHC + 2GB in backup camera that was swapped out when the 4GB ran out - I shoot pure RAW now that ufraw has support for noise reduction.)
For the most part, I was in ISO 100 the entire show because I completely forgot that I now have a camera where ISOs above 100 are actually useful. Old habits die hard!
That said, even at ISO 100, motion blur was rarely a problem for me, panning the 200 was easy and that plus SR appear to have been more than sufficient. 90% of the images I threw out were for one of two reasons:
1) Blown highlights, while images with a sky background almost always underexpose, sometimes they don't and if you've got +1 dialed in for the typical underexposure you're going to get some overexposures. For the most part these were only a small fraction of my photos.
2) Subject too far away and appeared tiny
I also need to remember that unlike 90% of eBay lenses, new lenses like my 50-200 don't come with UV filters for protection. I got scared that I might have already chipped the coating on my new lens, but instead I think it was just a minor bug splat that came right off with some lens cleaner. As soon as I realized I'd forgotten to get a filter I went right out and bought one.
I had a CP but never got around to using it. Another "old habits" issue - my old Sigma 28-200 that was on my family's old PZ-70 would rotate the front elements to focus, which made using a CP a nightmare. I probably could have used it for the show, but I got quite good results without it anyway.
Once I actually finished filtering the duds and began actually postprocessing, I was amazed with the results. Some of my favorites so far are attached, once I manage to PP the entire batch I will post them to my Smugmug account and link to it in an edit (later this week, hopefully).
I am absolutely amazed by my new DA 50-200 (arrived from B&H Thursday, just in time for the air show Friday/Saturday). Definately worth every penny, I strongly reccommend it for anyone who is looking for a lens to cover that zoom range.
So far, no crops, no post processing other than RAW conversion with ufraw with a noise reduction threshold of 50 and auto exposure, with the exception of applying unsharp mask with Gimp's defaults to the F-15 takeoff picture.
Edit: I finished converting the images from Friday night's show to JPEG. Friday evening was definately a unique show with some great results, although I had to throw away everything but my tripod-mounted fireworks shots. (see aforementioned "old habits die hard" comment regarding ISO settings.) They are located at
Andy Dodd : photos : 2007 Greater Binghamton Air Show (Part 1) - powered by SmugMug. Hopefully by Tuesday evening I'll have the Saturday shots converted to JPEG and PPed appropriately.
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