Recently Miles had its Back To The Bush Festival consisting of a week of action packed fun, which can all be viewed on the official Facebook page for Back To The Bush.
Along with the Festival was an air show, with various planes flying in formation and doing stunts above the town.
We usually stick to using tripods and being firmly on the ground photographing Landscapes and Astrophotography, but when you get an offer like this you simply cannot turn it down!
Having been offered an amazing opportunity to photograph a WWII Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk air to air from a Lockheed L-10A Electra, a very similar plane to Amelia Earhart’s 10E Electra, we did as much research as possible to ensure getting the hero shot from this very brief once in a lifetime opportunity.
Using a slower shutter speed of 1/50 the propeller has the chance to do a full rotation giving the image a lot of action and motion, the problem with slow shutter speed is you need to be 100% still for the duration, or motion blur will occur on the entire image, which I quickly realized is extremely difficult from another small plane at low speed.
Using the Nikon D850 3D continuous focus tracking throughout the brief experience kept the focus locked on the Kittyhawk, paired with the use of Shutter Priority kept the slow exposure and still correctly exposed despite shooting through a window in the Electra.
It would have been very easy to capture a sharp crisp image at 1/8000 but that would also make the propeller be dead still and look motionless and very strange for the plane being airborne, plus there’s no fun if it isn’t a challenge!
Nikon D850, Nikkor 28-300mm,
Camera Settings: 1/50 | f/13 | ISO
If you are interested in browsing more of our fine art photography or purchasing prints, please feel free to browse our website and follow our Facebook and Instagram