29 April 2008

Thunder Over Louisville 2008


TOL AIR SHOW_002
Originally uploaded by kaiju_images
Here's a lesson on trusting your gut when doing a photo shoot.

I spent the day in Louisville during Thunder Over Louisville which is the opening of Derby month. There was an airshow followed by a huge fireworks display. I had Googled online to find information on how to shoot fast jets and other aircraft. The recommendations were to shoot at 1/1000th or faster at f/8. Those settings would be able to stop the jets going at speed.

One problem, the weather was not cooperating. The sky was extremely overcast. Doing a check of the light situation I found that I was not going to be able to get those speeds without boosting the ISO to 800. I really hate shooting at higher than ISO400 especially on days like that. Combine that with my poor choice of using a 2x teleconvertor, and I really had pushed myself into a bad lighting situation.

"What the hey," I thought, "I can always fix any problems in Photoshop." I should have listened to my gut that was telling me not to use the teleconvertor and just go with the 70-300mm zoom and set the ISO to 400. Instead I used the teleconvertor, boosted my ISO to 800 and shot away.

As you can see from the photos, shooting gray jets on a gray overcast sky sucks to begin with and I had to compound it with my poor choices. If I had gone with my gut I wouldn't have lost 2 stops of light.

Lesson learned.

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