PhotographyBanzai.com

I finally completed processing my photos of the Rockford Airfest (Airshow) 2011. Any photographer will tell you that airshows require special care to avoid mounds of extra effort in post processing. This is primarily due to sensor dust and variation of exposure depending on the direction you are taking a photo. Even with new camera bodies that have dust removal mechanisms, it still isn’t enough to avoid the issue due to the extreme nature of photographing distant objects on bright skies. I have a few basic tools to remove dust and attempted to clean my sensor as well as possible before the event, but I wasn’t completely successful at keeping the sensor completely dust free. The second issue was that my K-5 was having issues, which lead me to re-seat the lens a few times as I was trying to diagnose the issue. That meant even more dust would get into the camera body.  The final issue was that while putting spray-type sunscreen on my arms, I managed to get speckles on my DA* 300mm’s U...

I had a request to provide unprocessed full resolution images from the airshow I went to recently where I used the K-5, DA* 300mm f4, and Kenko 1.5x Pz AF teleconverter together. I’ll be providing a few images with 100% crops straight from camera raw default settings for your viewing pleasure. The first image shows some movement blur and how well I did on tracking with AF. This isn’t a representation of absolute sharpness, but rather what type of result you might get in extreme conditions as long as you gained decent focus on the subject: The UPS plane was stationary, so this is a better representation of sharpness (long distance from subject): This person’s t-shirt is also a good representation of sharpness (close distance from the subject):  I still see some motion blur in this shot, but most of the text is readable: Another result which might have benefited from a faster shutter speed: Doing a little math that combination gives me around 680mm in full-frame terms. I think in abs...