Digital Photo Shooting

A Digital Photo Shooting Session of Airplanes in an Air Show
By Ziv Haparnas

A few weeks ago I went with my friends to see an air show. The schedule was packed with acrobatics and many types of planes. The highlight of the show was the blue angles with their jets doing dangerous routines. I took my camera hoping to capture some good digital memories of that show.

I took my digital SLR camera to the air show. I put it in my special camera bag alongside an extra battery and lenses. I used an eight mega pixels DSLR with a 100-300mm zoon lenses.

I decided to shoot as many photos as I could knowing from my experience that in such cases the rule of big numbers works very well – shoot as many photos as you can and you might be able to find a few photos which are really unique. So when the airplanes started to fly around I pointed my camera at them and from that point on I watched most of the air show through my camera’s viewfinder.

I set my camera to automatic continuous focus. I had my finger holding the shutter button half way down most of the time while I am moving the camera to track those fast flying airplanes. I could hear the camera’s motors working hard moving the optical components in the lens back and forth to keep the focus right. I also set the camera to burst mode so whenever I decided the composition was worth shooting a photo it actually shot a fast sequence of four photos. The idea behind that was first to get more photos to choose from – with fast flying planes these four photos were really different from each other – and second to maybe be able to capture some motion in a sequence of photos.