So have a moment to myself and was lookin at images from a month ago. I don’t post many shots of jets in part because I don’t have that many that really say flight. I have lots of images of jets, but they just don’t say visually they are flying. What does it take, at least for me, to have an image saying a jet if flying? Well one of the first things I need in the photograph is a background. Blue skies by themselves just don’t cut it for me. Next there is the light. You might think light should be the first and it is, it’s the reason the camera went up to my eye in the first place. But in communicating flight for jets, it needs a little something extra to bring across the illusion of flight. I say illusion because it is a still of a moving object.
I’m shooting with my normal rig, D4s / 200-400 and since I’m shooting jets, I’m in Aperture priority. In Aperture because there is no prop to blur. So rather then concentrating on the prop, with jets I look at the background and light. The top photo of the F-100 expresses it pretty well cause if you know the F-100, it’s one loud plane! And the Blue Angels, like wow, not like there’s not a thousand photos of them. Shooting them then, I not only look for what I’ve already talked about but more. I go for the really low percentage shot by shooting them really tight and from an angle not normally used. In this case, I went up, not shooting from the ground but from a perch 30 feet off the ground. Na, these aren’t the best shots but they were fun to go after and fun to look at a month later. Simple clicks just passin by!