Fuji Pushing the envelope with the X-T1

Lightmancer

Legend
Location
Sunny Frimley
Name
Bill Palmer
I took my X-T1 to the Wings and Wheels event at Dunsfold Park this year. I used to do a lot of airshow photography back when I were a lad, but apart from a dabble last year, this is the first time I have seriously done so for a few years. Although I took the new 18-135, the vast majority of my shots were with the 55-200. I shot 1350 exposures, split over 3 SD cards. Using the battery grip (two batteries) I was surprised that it took just over 1000 shots to deplete the first battery. I was less surprised to find that once I had filled the two Sandisk Extreme Plus cards that I had which write at 80mb/s I really struggled when I had to switch to an older 30mb/s card. I was hitting the buffer time after time. I was incidentally shooting raw+jpg with the drive set to CL and firing bursts of 3 or 4 at a time (after that it is better to reframe, I find, rather than try and follow focus a fast jet any real distance...)

Anyway, here are some results. There is a bit of mushyness in some, particularly, frustratingly, the Vulcan shots but for the most part the X-T1 put in a good performance. It's partly the user, anyway, for I tend to not use the highest shutter speeds, particularly with prop-driven aircraft, in order to get some sense of movement.. 300mm equivalent is a good focal length for this type of show, although I admit that some of these are crops to make the composition tighter. Anyway, here we are:

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Apache 5 par Lightmancer, on ipernity

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Vulcan 5 par Lightmancer, on ipernity

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Vulcan Gnats 2 par Lightmancer, on ipernity

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Spitfire Mk IXB Mustang P51D 6 par Lightmancer, on ipernity

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Stunt 2 par Lightmancer, on ipernity

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Fokker Triplanes 1 par Lightmancer, on ipernity

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Canberra Hunter 3 par Lightmancer, on ipernity

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Wings and Wheels Dunsfold August 2014 X-T1 Lancasters 5 100% crop par Lightmancer, on ipernity
 
Bill ~ beautiful work! I'm keenly interested in your focus-tracking techniques. I'm struggling with slower moving subjects and would love your advice.

/Ty (XT-1)
 
Bill ~ beautiful work! I'm keenly interested in your focus-tracking techniques. I'm struggling with slower moving subjects and would love your advice.

/Ty (XT-1)
Hi Ty,

There are no magicsecrets, but I can share with you what I did. I used the X-T1 with grip, and the 55-200. You can look at the EXIF on my files at Ipernity but from memory, I didn't zoom out much more than 135mm. I had the camera set to max ISO of 800, on aperture priority. metering was spot, most of the time, and AF was set to single point wide. I fire in short bursts - 3-4 at a time, then refocus and recompose. This is partly because that's about as long as I can track for accurately, and partly because I have a dodgy shoulder at the moment so holding the weight of the rig aloft for any longer than a few seconds at a time is not easy for me. When the aircraft come into view, I follow them with my naked eye over the top of the prism hump, then drop my eye to the viewfinder as they come into range; this saves hunting around the skies for a small, fast moving object with a telephoto lens. I start to follow before I press the shutter release, then swing steadily through my range. I don't use ultra high shutter speeds because it results in the prop planes in particular looking like flies in amber - a little propeller blur gives a sense of speed and movement.

Finally, bear in mind that as I said at the outset, I took 1350 exposures, from which I have maybe 3 dozen I am happy with, and I am only sharing the "top 8" here. These represent less than 1% of total exposures on the day. In this type of photography you have to kiss a lot of frogs...

Hope that helps!
 
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