Planes of Fame flew their BT-13 on 7/4 and 7/5. I went out both days to practice and grab some shots of it. Since it was so hot I just hid in my car and waited for the plane to take off so that I could get shots of it from the parking lot. I should have used my teleconverter to get a little closer on some of the shots or not used my 3 stop ND filter.
I was on my way over to the Chino Airport to photograph the Stearman flying over. As I was headed over I spotted this Peregrine Falcon flying around. I pulled over to take some shots of this magnificent predator out hunting for food. It was my first chance to try and capture a bird in flight and I am pretty happy with the results. Minimal fixes required in Lightroom to brighten the photo up a little.
During the Thunderbird flyover of LA I went to my local hospital that looked like it was going to be in the flight path of the F16s. Unfortunately they didn’t exactly fly over the hospital they were a little far out and flying right at the tree line in the distance. So by the time my camera was able to track them these were the best I could get.
Camera Settings:
ISO 400
100-400mm on an A6500 so the lens was 600mm
1/4000
f6.3
I kept the aperture wide and raised the ISO from 100 to 400 to make sure the camera was shooting as fast as possible to give me the best chance as possible to catch some images. Luckily I had setup for this ahead of time as I wouldn’t have had any time to make changes once I saw the planes flying.
I haven’t been able to do much shooting for planes and such so I have been stuck in my backyard and taking shots. Just a couple of simple shots with my 100-400 on the A6500 with a polarizing filter on. Going through all of the notes for my camera the Phase Detection focusing only works below F11 so I am testing out different ND filters to see what will allow me keep the aperture down so that the Wide Angle focusing with focus lock will work. One reason to always read the manual so that you can find out about the individual quirks of the camera systems that you are using.
A nice lizard just sitting there sunning itself and then our really scraggily Schnauzer Sydney.
While I have been home I have been watching the KelbyOne videos on Youtube and watched this one about Photo Printing so I decided to test it out and see what worked best for me. I did most of what Scott Kelby recommended and included screenshots of my settings down below. I then submitted the photos to Bay Photo to test out their service as an 11×14 print. I think the biggest thing I learned was the sharpening and then the brightness for printing. I used this photo as my test photo:
This is Spanish Shawl Nudibranch that I shot while underwater. Unfortunately my prints never looked as good as the screen. So hopefully after this test I will have photos that look better. I chose Glossy for the photos as I am printing on Luster with Bay photo.
The photos came in and I have to say that the 20% looked the best and most closely resembled what I was looking for. Now that I have these settings I am going to keep going forward with printing some more photos and displaying them around my house. I mean what else do I have to do during the safer at home order. Might as well make my area pretty and enjoy it.
I started this project a couple of weeks and decided to go around and document the dairies in the area. Where I live has been a dairy area for a long time, but as they build more houses more and more of the dairies are leaving and becoming housing. I thought it was important and kind of cool to document what was left and some of the different diaries that were here.
I gave up trying to run my own wordpress blog after I screwed it up royally. I am going to start this one and hope that things go better.
This is my blog to help improve my photographic skills and to be able to show what it is I have done and how I have improved.
