boring camera talk.

don't forget to click the pic

This is what I used to take the latest F-16 pictures. I would sure hate to walk around with a rig like this, so I don't. I usually carry my Canon 7D Mark two with a Canon 24- 105 zoom lens on it. But quite often the pictures you see on my blog are taken with a Sony RX100  mark 3 that fits in the pocket of my T-shirt.

Some F-16s were flying over yesterday on their practice bombing runs so I decided to try taking some pictures again even though the pictures I've been taking have been rather poor and barely worth putting on my blog.

I started thinking about the problems I was having getting the pictures and what I could do to make them better. Most things were beyond my control, such as the planes are pretty far away, and moving very quickly giving me only four or five seconds to take a picture, and it would often take me that long just to find them in the sky, I could hear the roar of the engines, knew the plane was way ahead of the sound, but it was still a very small target against a huge expanse of Arizona blue sky.

I've been using a Canon 100 – 400 zoom lens handheld to take these airplane pictures because I really don't like using a tripod if I can possibly help it, and the ball head mount that I have on my tripod would probably have made it more difficult to chase down an airplane in the sky anyway.

I don't shoot much video anymore so I had forgotten about the Manfrotto fluid head video camera mount that I bought a while back and figured that might solve some of my problems. That kind of video camera mount makes it easy to smoothly pan and tilt the camera in any direction so your video is not jerky whenever you move the camera which is just what I needed to be able to follow the jets as the zip across the sky.

So I mounted my Canon 7D Mark two camera on the tripod using that head and it helped a great deal. The planes were still very far away but at least when I did get a shot the camera was held relatively still, and the smooth panning of the video mount made it easier to follow the airplane across the sky.

Now even zoomed out to 400 mm the planes are still very far away and pretty small in the picture so I still have to crop the picture a great deal to get what you see here. And then when I put them on my blog the Internet messes around with them which makes the picture look even worse, but they are a little better than they were.

And I found out that I really liked using this video head better than my normal ball mount, it makes composing a picture way easier, so I think I'll leave it on and try taking a few regular pictures with it and see if I want to use it all the time instead of the ball head mount.

I hope this post hasn't been too boring for everyone. I know a lot of folks like to take pictures so I thought there might be some interest out there about how I get mine.

                                theboondork

this is an unedited picture taken with a 100 mm lens, so the F-16 is way bigger in the sky than what I'm seeing with my eyes. A dot is pretty much all I can see when the planes fly by.

Using the Manfrotto video head and the Canon 100-400 lens, I'm still having to crop way in  on the airplane so the pictures wouldn't be suitable for printing, but I'm getting more that are suitable for the Internet than I was before.

The only reason this F-16 looks like he's flying almost level with my camera is because he's so far away.

Making his turn over the Rodeo arena. Looks like he's got one Sidewinder left.

Flying into the sun.