Red Arrows

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.