50 SEPTEMBER 2019 ÇPlane&Pilot
Is this Sea Fury deadsticking it in? It's not, though it sure looks like it. That's because the prop is stopped, the effect of the photographer using
too fast a shutter speed. Selecting a slower setting helps you get at least a little motion on the prop to avoid the stopped-prop effect.It’s not a binary problem, however. Completely stopped
is bad, but how about “mostly” stopped? The question of
how “stopped” is “too stopped” is at heart a philosophical
one, but suffice it to say that you need at least a hint of the
prop moving—the more, the better. The greatest shots of
airplanes in flight show a full, buttery prop blur, an effect
that is never achieved by mistake and is essentially impos-
sible (or darned close to it) to achieve from the ground.
But how does one keep the prop from being frozen
in time? By using a slow shutter speed. Sounds simple
enough, right? How I wish that were true!
Without going into too much technical detail, the
shutter speed is simply how fast the shutter opens and
closes. A fast shutter speed is great for avoiding blur,
which is one of its greatest advantages. But the airplanes
we're concerned with in Plane & Pilot have propellers for
the most part, and that makes them hugely problematic.
Here’s why.
In order to get a good prop blur (which, again, makes
it look as though the prop is still doing its thing), you
need to shoot with a slow shutter speed, which allows the
shutter to be open long enough to “see” the prop moving
through its arc. And if you’re thinking that a shot of an
airplane with its prop blurred throughout its 360-degree
travel must be taken at really slow shutter speeds, you’re
right. Impossibly slow shutter speeds, too!
A couple of other things. As a pilot, you know that the
prop doesn’t spin at one rate. The tips spin much, much,
much faster than the roots, and the longer the prop, the
more pronounced this effect is. So as you begin to slow
the prop, you’ll begin to see a weird and wholly unnatural
effect, sometimes referred to as the Go-Pro effect (afterthe popular action cam), in which the prop appears to
be made of rubber. That, too, is unsettling.
So what do you do?
You can use a slower shutter speed by putting the
camera in manual exposure mode or by selecting the
shutter priority mode, often depicted as the “S” on the
selector dial. This allows you to select the shutter speed.
Remember, the slower the better, up to a point, and the
camera will automatically pick what it calculates to
be the proper aperture (which is how wide the lens is
selected to open). If you select 1/100 of a second—and I
promise that this technical part of the program will be
over in a flash—on a bright day, the camera will choose
a small aperture. That’s because the longer the shutter is
open, the more light the lens gathers. To compensate for
the long exposure, the camera picks a narrow opening.
Here’s the rub. When you slow down the shutter speed
enough to capture a good prop arc, you’re also keeping the
shutter open long enough to capture every little shake and
shimmy that occurs while it’s open, which is why some
photos look blurry. If you’re using a slow shutter speed,
like 1/100 of a second, while hand-holding the camera,
you need to be really steady not to get a blurry image. Few
photographers are good or lucky enough to pull it off. A
speed of 1/125 will get you some prop stopping in most
instances, and 1/150 will begin to stop the prop notice-
ably, but in many instances acceptably. How slow is the
shutter speed on the best air-to-air images? Around 1/60
of a second, which can only be reliably achieved with a
gyroscopic stabilizer, which alone costs more than the
entire camera outfits most of us use.
So, shutter speed is a dilemma. It is, in fact, the defining