The Best Lens for the Job

All eyes are pointed upward when the Blue Angels fly overhead.  Thousands of outstretched hands holding iPhones and iPads follow the action from one horizon to the other.  Hundreds of SLRs record the action.  Everyone is a photographer.

The serious photographers are a much smaller group.  They arrive with the longest lens they own and shoot until the planes are tiny or their buffers are full.   We can't help but check to see who has the longest lens.  Today the guy with the 600mm was the winner.  

We all photograph the same thing from the same place.  During the peak action, the crowd will produce thousands of virtually identical photos.  How many Blue Angel photos does the world need?

I don't have many opportunities to photograph air shows.  Budget cuts have reduced the size and frequency of the performances.  The Blue Angels didn't fly at all last year.  This could be the last year that they fly.  

All my experience and decisions converge as I follow the aircraft with my lens.  I do the best I can.  When the show is over, I'm exhausted.  I spent 10 hours standing on a concrete flight line on the day that is statistically the hottest day of the Nebraska summer.  

As I walk a mile back to my car, I pass the guy with the 600mm lens.  He also has a huge tripod and a couple of other cameras and lens.  I don't envy him at this point.  

I downloaded all my images before I quit for the evening.   Overall, I was very  pleased.  However, the peak action takes place at "Show Center" and the 400mm was too long to show all the aircraft in the larger formations.  A zoom would have helped.  I also missed one aircraft in some of the opposing solo flights.  Finally, I was unable to photograph the smoke trail patterns left by the planes without a wider lens.  I definitely didn't need a 600mm lens.  Perhaps a shorter zoom would have worked better.

The Offutt Air Show is a two day event.  I decided to photograph the Sunday show with my very sharp 70-200mm lens.  I would be almost as close with the close-ups and could back off to 70mm to photograph smoke trails and the solo passes.  

Day 2 wasn't as hazy.  I took fewer photos because the Blue Angels had to be closer to me before they were large enough to shoot at 200mm.  Most of the time I wanted to zoom in more than the 200mm position allowed.  70mm wasn't wide enough to capture smoke trails very well either. 

I reviewed the  Day 2 photos after downloading.  If they had been the only photos I took,  I would have been very pleased with them.  They were properly exposed and sharp.  They could be cropped in Lightroom.

I wanted to see how they compared in more detail.  I found a moment were the shot from Day 1 and Day 2 were nearly identical.  I loaded them both in Photoshop.  I increased the size of the Day 2 shot until it was the same size as the Day 1 shot.  (200% larger)   The image below is a close-up of a small portion of the 200mm image.  When you place the mouse on the image, it switches to the 400mm version.

The aircraft were in a slightly different position on each day - the tire of the rear aircraft is noticeably higher on day 1.  The 400mm version has more detail - you can see a difference in the sharpness of the lettering.  The overall appearance of the 200mm version looks noisy - this is visible in the blue paint and the canopy. 

This isn't a unique photo -thousands of photos were taken as the aircraft overlapped.  Both lenses produced an image with more detail than the iPhones and most of the SLRs were able to capture.  The 400mm lens worked best for me and produced the shot that I wanted.  

The complete image is shown below - put the mouse on the image to shift from the 200mm version to the 400mm example.