Syncro Pair Fail
Posted: Fri 15 Aug 2014, 16:59
I have just done the first pass of my images from the Eastbourne Air Show yesterday. One of the shots which I wanted to get was of the Red Arrows syncro pair crossing. My technique was to pan with the aircraft coming from my left with the camera set to 8 fps and hope for the best. It worked well and I got a number of shots with the planes in good positions, with the image you see here being my least worst result. The left hand plane is sharp as I was keeping up with it as I panned, but the shutter speed of 1/800 was much too slow to freeze the other plane. Each is flying at 400 mph, which represents a closing speed of 800 mph, which makes a much higher shutter speed a real necessity.
One option would be to try and convince the judge that I intended to get this result and the blur in the right hand plane represents movement with an appropriate title, e.g. "The Fast and the Slow", but I guess few would be fooled by that. No doubt they would want to see more movement so that they could be more certain that this was deliberate on my part.
So, some very impressive flying by the Red Arrows, but less than impressive photography on my part. It was nearly a good shot, but fell short. The important thing is to learn from such mistakes, which is why I am sharing here, and the next time my shutter speed will be 1/4000.
One option would be to try and convince the judge that I intended to get this result and the blur in the right hand plane represents movement with an appropriate title, e.g. "The Fast and the Slow", but I guess few would be fooled by that. No doubt they would want to see more movement so that they could be more certain that this was deliberate on my part.
So, some very impressive flying by the Red Arrows, but less than impressive photography on my part. It was nearly a good shot, but fell short. The important thing is to learn from such mistakes, which is why I am sharing here, and the next time my shutter speed will be 1/4000.
