You all have flown before and heard stewardess say, "Put your trays in the upright position and fasten your seatbelt" Not on these planes, you are in a whole different environment when you shoot bombers. You have to have a different perspective when it comes to photographing these giant birds. You only have a few seconds to get the shots off and you have to have your camera set and ready to start "shooting"!! These giant behemoths move pretty quickly and of course you have to follow them as they are flying (if your lucky enough to be in another plane, then you don't have to worry). So how do we shoot a moving airplane, think shutter speed here, real fast shutter speed. These types of planes are moving somewhere in the vicinity of 150 to 225 miles per hour. You look down at your camera for 2 seconds and they have travelled over 500 feet away from you. Take into consideration you would have to find them in your viewfinder and focus you would probably lose another couple of hundred feet. So what do you do? Well here I had a bright sunny day, (f/stop was at F13), shutter speed was at 1/160th of a second, almost stopping the propellors in the air, which you don't want to do (come on the plane is flying)!! One more thing, you have to focus on the plane as it is coming towards you and begin shooting. Of course having a motor drive helps here because you can "machine gun" the camera at the bomber and if your using a zoom lens you can zoom in an out for some really cool effects! Take your time and time it, make sure all of your settings on the camera are set ahead of time and soon you will become an "ace" with some really cool photos of World War II Warbirds!!
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