planeandpilotmag.com 49done early in the morning or in the late afternoon/early
evening. That’s when the light is nice and the contrast is
muted. Fashion photography has its own set of demands,
as does landscape, portrait, automotive, sports and, well,
you get the idea. Just because you’re good at one kind of
photography doesn’t make you good at a new kind. It’s
humbling, but it’s true.
In terms of its specific challenges, aviation photography
is arguably the worst, and with so many different kinds of
weird and conflicting considerations, it just seems unfair.
Some of the issues can be dealt with, and we’ll get into
those strategies, while others need to be worked around.
KNOW THE CHALLENGES
When taking pictures of airplanes, there are several com-
mon mistakes that are easy to make. It might be more
accurate to say that they are really hard not to make. We
see amateur photos all the time that are shining examples
of what not to do. Sometimes these images contain mul-
tiple mistakes. Sometimes they would have been really
good or even great photographs had it not been for one
glaring error.
Here are some of those common mistakes and how
to avoid them. Be forewarned, though. The reason tak-
ing great photos of planes is so hard is because most of
these mistakes are built into the subject and the setting in
which they’re usually shot. There are, in many instances,
physical constraints that you can’t think, finesse or power
your way through. You’ve got to understand them, respect
them and work within your limitations and theirs.
- YOU’RE TOO FAR AWAY.
Airplanes are small and the sky is big. With rare excep-
tions, no one wants to see a photo of the sky with a dot
directly in the middle of it. There are a couple of obvious
solutions for this. One, you should get closer, though that’s
often easier said than done. You can use a telephoto lens,
which we highly recommend, though doing so will make
it harder to keep the camera steady and more difficult to
find the plane in the viewfinder. Moreover, if the plane is
really small in the sky, even a long lens won’t help much.
If you’re shooting with your phone, well, there’s probably
little you can do to solve this problem, so save your shoot-
ing finger for better chances. The other thing you can
do is get closer to the planes, though, again, that can be
hard to pull off. At Oshkosh, the gaggles of orange-vested
pro photographers roaming the flight line where mere
mortals are forbidden to go is evidence that if you want
great stuff, you need to get close. But whatever you do,
follow airport rules and don’t violate any off-limits areas.
More than one eager photographer has found him or
herself in the back of a squad car. In general, get closer,
use longer lenses and very often, just hold off until the
plane gets closer.- YOU STOPPED THE PROP.
This is by far the greatest challenge in aviation photog-
raphy, and I ’ ll go into a little detail on this so you under-
stand the nature of the issue. For starters, the reason you
don’t want your image of a Corsair racing past to have a
stopped prop frozen in a thin slice of time is that, to use
the technical jargon, it just looks stupid.
The idea of a photograph is to capture the experi-
ence we have with our own eyes, and if you were to see
a Corsair flying by with its prop stopped, well, you’d be
understandably freaked out and instantly calculating its
forced landing options. Instead, we want to see that big
beautiful bird with its supernaturally long prop blurred
out, at least to some great degree, so the viewer can see
that the prop is turning as God and nature intended.
LEFT: Those are airplanes in
the sky. We promise. It looks
like it might be a Corsair and,
in the background of the
background, something with
two tails, maybe? Planes are
small compared to the sky. But
there are ways to overcome
this, to a degree, anyway.
RIGHT: This terrific shot is a
great example of using the
setting to your advantage. Here
a V-22 Osprey tiltrotor makes
its own prop-tip contrails and
in the process creates a sense
of movement even if the blades
themselves aren't seen to be
moving much.