The August 2016 bank holiday
weekend weather was a real mixed bag - occasional periods of
sunshine, but mostly grey and overcast with prolonged heavy
downpours. Sitting on the flightline at Dunsfold Wings &
Wheels Air Show was pretty rough to say the least, especially
on the sunday. As the day progressed there really was no
sunshine to speak of - the thickness of the cloud cover did
vary, with no more than a couple of hours of 'whitish' clouds
while for the rest of the day they were a pretty dark grey.
When you
are shooting in low light, even with a fairly fast lens, you
will find your images come out with low contrast and a reduced
colour gamut. The inevitable 'grey on grey' conditions often
means you will need to shoot in manual mode with your iso set
to auto plus a little exposure compensation. The noise from
increased iso settings is handled pretty well by most modern
cameras up to around iso800 or even 1600, but the moment you
go over these values, your photos will begin to suffer.
Typically I will shoot in jpeg at
air shows as I often come away with a few thousand photos - at
10 frames a second on my 7d mkii I can bang out over 100 shots
before the camera's buffer begins to slow down. OK I could
shoot in RAW and have the ability to change the exposure
settings in post processing, and limit the amount of visible
noise in the image by not using sharpening.
But for me
shooting in RAW is not really an option - the buffer slows
down after 25-30 shots (depending on the shutter speed), and I
prefer to use HDR software to increase the colours and
contrast. This photo was actually pretty flat, but as you can
see Photomatix brought out the colours quite nicely after
which I gave the image another couple of treatments to produce
a painterly effect.
Dunsfold
Wings & Wheels Air Show is based at the home of the Top Gear
race track at Dunsfold in Surrey. It is however much more than
just an air show, with as the name suggest a lot of wheels on
the ground, including Monster Trucks, Stunt Zone (cars doing
donuts and burning rubber), Motorcycle Displays, a Military
Vehicle Parade and dozens of Classic and Supercars zipping
along the runway twice during the day. If you like this mix
then do put it in your diary for the August Bank Holiday
Weekend... https://www.wingsandwheels.net/ |