Lee Orchard Photography

Photographing aircraft can be a bit difficult. Based on past experience I have had some success and also some failures.

The first thing is trying to get the aircraft in the viewfinder and focused. I found, that just to get the shot, without worrying about composition, I set the camera to AF Servo mode and centre point focusing. This way I know that the camera will focus for me, and if I keep the aircraft in the centre of the frame, that’s where it will focus and not hunt on the other AF points. (of course it doesn’t always work, but at least you know what you are working with!)

Then, instead of just pointing the camera at the aircraft and keeping your finger half pressed to track the plane, I’ll focus on the plane as soon as it is big enough in the focus point, then lightly half press the shutter button, again and again, focusing in small increments. I found this works well with flying birds and with aircraft, instead of the camera doing all the work. This way, if theS aircraft slips off the focus point, there is less chance it will start to focus on something that doesn’t exist and so waste valuable time refocusing.

Next, exposure. The aircraft will normally be back lit, so a bit of overexposure is required making sure the sky doesn’t disappear to white, particularly on overcast and solid cloud days. A bit of blue sky is good, although can be boring so a bit of both is better.

Now, shutter speed. Not too much of an issue with jets. Keep it high, which it probably will be on auto, pointing it into the sky, but for older planes, like WWII, then you have the propeller issue and need a slower speed.

Too fast and you freeze the propeller, making it look like the aircraft is a static model, too slow and the whole aircraft is blurred. I’ve found between 1/125 & 1/320 seems to do the trick. It also seems to depend on whether the aircraft is coming toward you or passing. The Mustang in yesterdays blog, was coming towards me, and had a shutter speed of 1/640, leaving a little blur. I was lucky for the prop not to be frozen.This image shows a photo with cloud in it, compared to plain sky. It also shows one aircraft where the shutter speed was slightly too high and frozen the prop. The middle photo, seems just right with a shutter speed of 1/200

I think the above is a good guide, but you need to review your images as you take them and make adjustments to the conditions at the time. Of course, doing all of this, whist not missing the aircraft you are trying to photograph that is still flying above you! Thats what I’ll be trying to do this weekend!!

Well the weather is still wet, however at the moment it looks like Saturday may be ok. Lets hope so, as I am still hoping to go to the Biggin Hill Airshow which is on all this weekend.

Now, I have been to a couple in the past an been lucky with the weather, however one I went to it bucketed it down at the beginning and I remember this poor guy having to fly in an open cockpit WWI tri-plane! I had to try and keep the camera out of the torrential rain, then try and get a photo when the aircraft was in the correct position so as not to get water on the lens. Get an interesting grainy photo though, where the graining was the rain!

I have quite good waterproof gear for myself, and some decent protection for the camera, put you still have to keep it off the lens. Luckily that time it didn’t last for long and made for interesting photos, but you don’t want it all the time.

This weekend at Biggin Hill, hopefully I should see, Spitfires, Lancaster, Mustangs, Red Arrows & a Typhoon. Never seen or photographed one of them! Ah, just realised, the Typhoon, is probably going to be the EuroFighter, not the WWII Typhoon, shame… Does a flying on of those exist?.. Short Answer: No.

Well I seemed to get the weather correct for the weekend. Wasn’t it miserable! I don’t think it stopped raining for more than a couple of hours at any one time! I think this week isn’t going to be any better either (except today, sunshine!). I hope it does get better, as there is an airshow this weekend that I would like to go to.

So, what did I do? Well the hallway now has 1 coat of paint on it. Wow, how interesting!

Yesterday, I designed a couple of new long rulers. I realised that after my trip to Painshill the other week, I now had enough good images to make a nice barn owl long ruler.

This was the result.

I also designed new Red Arrow & another World War II fighter ruler.

These are now on the rulers pages and I have also added some others

and the cat ruler, which I didn’t realise was missing!

As much as I enjoyed getting the painting done, and designing the new rulers, lets hope the weather cheers up soon!

As usual it looks like it is going to rain this coming bank holiday weekend. So, as it was nice yesterday, I popped at lunchtime to the local park.

There seemed to be a lot of what looked like small moths flying around, and a few butterflies. I was looking at what I think was a moth, when I suddenly saw a flash of bright orange!

It landed just long enough to get this photo.

Its a Small Copper butterfly, only approx 35mm in size.

It’s incredible how nature manages to make things so small but so pretty.