Yeah, did this. £25 quid each. Still, I figure we get double the value for money by being there for twice the time.

TBH, it is lovely for the first couple of hours. It's quiet, there are a few bizjet arrivals and departures, and if the weather's nice, there are a lot of worse things to do than sitting in the sunshine on an airfield.

I would encourage any forum folk that are genuinely interested in aeroplanes, are within driving distance of White Waltham airfield, and think they might find me a tolerable individual IRL, to drop me a PM, and we can organise a wander about airside. Take some pics, watch the flying (the local aerobatic guys quite often practise in the overhead, so there can be a mini-airshow to watch), and, most importantly, count the bunnies.

It's a pleasant afternoon out, and the food and atmosphere are dead nice.

That bit is easy.... at Farnborough at any rate.

1. Get up very early.

2. Carry a heavy cool-box and camera bag a long way, walking as fast as possible, to beat all the other nutters that have also got up very early, to the good spot.

3. Wait five and a half hours for the flying to start.

Edit...

... and 4. Be prepared to defend your little patch against all the ******s that think it's Ok to turn up late, muscle their way to the front, and trample all over your stuff.

... and 5. Be prepared to spend a long time hanging out, eating ice cream, waiting for the car park to clear so that you can get out without sitting in a queue for 90 minutes or more

Yes, agreed. I do know the feeling... but are they really catching the moment? Hard to tell from the LCD on the back. I had loads that looked good on the LCD, that were rubbish on the computer. Unless you really zoom in to 20x on every frame (and life is far too short for that!), I think it's impossible to tell what you've got till you can look properly.

If I skim through my plane photos, I've got loads that would be good if:

- they were sharper
- they were bigger in the frame
- there was more detail visible

From which I conclude that better AF, longer and better glass (though the 55-300 is pretty good) and perhaps more pixels, are the things I need to take better aircraft shots.

A few of my many duds are simply badly timed, but not many.

It's a funny thing, really. I'm not sure I could be bothered to take pictures at airshows if all there was to it was pointing the camera in the right general direction, holding the button down, and then flicking through the tens of thousands of shots on the computer later on.

I know I'm contradicting myself a bit... I'd like a longer lens, and faster AF.

That's about it though - I photograph aircraft more than I photograph anything else, and I've never hankered for more fps.

I guess if I had it, though, I'd get used to pressing the button a bit more "before" and holding it until a bit more "after".

I'm so hoping SAFOX IX is in whatever they're announcing at Photokina. Then I really would have to move up

Yes. This is the biggest single factor.
Yes. A lot goes on for which 300mm is too long. And too short!

Personally, I want a Bigma, really, before the next big airshow.
Possibly, in some cases.

That 4-aircraft burst might benefit from 6+ fps, but it's only a might, if 3fps isn't enough. And who knows if the AF-C can keep up anyway.

The usefulness of a high frame rate is even more tenuous for the Synchro-Pair crossing. Their relative speed is about 700mph, which is about 1000 feet per second. The aircraft are 40 feet long, so they only overlap for 0.08 of a second.

So you'd need 13fps before you got more than one frame in a burst with them overlapping!

Admittedly, more fps would improve your chances, but I'm not sure how useful this would be in practice.
Definitely not.

Once they've gone past, you always get quite a while before the next pass - and if you need more than a second or so at, say, 6+ fps, one should switch to still life, or get a video camera

FWIW, I don't use continuous mode at all at airshows.

No need to be. SR is your friend.

In general, 1/250s to get decent movement in propellers, 1/175s for the much older aircraft like the Tiger Moth. But the latter are going so slowly that it's much easier to get a smooth pan going, and then it's just normal shake that the SR is so good at dealing with.

That last one of the Reds is pretty good. Hard to get those sharp, usually, since they're coming straight towards the camera. It's slightly early (or late, depending on what you want), given that one of the four is obscured, but much sharper than mine from Farnborough.

Lots of people here have experience and knowledge on this subject.

If you search the forum for 'sensor cleaning', you'll find quite a lot of threads discussing it.

The options for sensors mostly boil down to:

- Arctic Butterfly
- Pentax cleaning kit
- Wet (swab/solution) kits

Cleaning the mirror at all seems to be an extremely risky business.

I shot one slide film in my life.

Composition: Not too bad
Exposure: Dreadful. Hopeless. Rubbish. Truly crap.

Back to film, until digital. Then it became affordable to work on getting exposure right

In that situation, yes, I expect it would be fine to do it that way.

The only action photography I have any experience of is aircraft, and it it would be hopeless! The light can be so different in different parts of the sky that manual techniques (especially focusing, as I mentioned elsewhere) are tricky to say the least.

I've heard metering off the grass and sticking with that as a technique, but I haven't really tried it. I probably should.

I'm surprised to hear this. I only ever took one slide film so I'm not at all qualified to comment. I guess centre-weighted must still give a good percentage of its calculation to the background in those camera.

If a central subject is bright enough, then it won't be a problem, but my experience is that with the K10D it's very easy to burn out the sky using C-W (and even more so with spot) to attempt to expose for a darker centre. It's no good having a beautifully exposed subject if the background is vile.

A lot easier than film, certainly.

But not if the subject is moving, so that you only get one go.