| After
the formation take-off, Vandam and Leeward treat
us to several laps of close flying! Notice the
comparison to this and the following shot by Mark
Johnston; though I was shooting with
"technically" a higher quality film,
Fujichrome Velvia 50 ISO and Astia 100 ISO slide
film, versus Mark’s Fuji Super HQ ASA 200
print film … His results are superior.
This is a
good example of the difference in letting the
camera set your exposure, rather than you setting
the exposure manually. For example, find an
object on the ground that is near the light
factor of your subject – the airplane –
and preset your camera on that object. Then,
shoot the aircraft at the preset light setting.
The sky will appear lighter, but the aircraft
will have it's features much more visible than if
you take your reading from the sky. This was a
hard learned lesson for me, as by not doing it in
this case.. I wound up losing quite a few shots
that might have been really good otherwise. Mark
Johnston uses a slightly different approach to
the above method...
Mark
Johnston: " I shot these photos using a
Nikon N-90S in ‘Aperture priority’
mode, where the camera aperture opening is set
manually and the camera sets the shutter speed. I
adjusted the aperture to give a good enough depth
of field so that focusing on the fast-moving jets
would not be too critical. Most importantly, the
Nikon’s light metering system was set to
‘spot’, meaning that the camera only
used light information from the very center of
the frame (where the jets were, hopefully!) to
set exposure.
Since the
jets were passing within about 100 feet at
closest approach to the pylon, I used an
Autofocus Zoom Nikkor 28 – 80 mm lens,
occasionally switching to a Tamron AF 200 –
400 zoom to get the aircraft as they came around
Pylon 8 and down the straightaway."
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