Aerobaltic 2018 Airshow - photos + lessons learned

I was at Aerobaltic 2018 last week, which was my first real airshow. Previously, I only saw Red Bull Air Race in 2014 (flickr album ) so I was quite excited for this one.

The show was great, and I was really happy with how things went in photography front. I shot gazillion of photos and quite a bit of video, which is both good and bad. Good, because spray and pray works wonders for inexperienced shooter like me Bad, because it's a pain to work through the images and do the selection (a bit more on that later).

I shot with E-M1 Mark II and Panasonic 100-300 II. And I'm happy how it performed.

I had no problems with focus, C-AF was very reliable and percentage of out of focus shots was very small. I did enable focus limiter, because why not. This was a night and day improvement over E-M10 I used for the Red Bull Air Race where I was forced to use pre-focus.

Another massive improvement was EVF. I could actually follow the planes and keep them in the frame while shooting and the very short blackout did not prevent me from doing so.

I used electronic shutter exclusively. Now, I was wondering if I'll have issues with rolling shutter, but it turns out that very fast sensor readout does a pretty good job of keeping those issues at bay (I'll post some more about this particular aspect later on).

The hardest part? Trying to get blurry propellers by shooting at relatively slow shutter speeds. That turned out to be super hard and I am so glad that E-M1 II has such impressive continuous shooting capability. I basically brute forced it. With enough shots, there was bound to be at least one good one. I did turn off stabilisation for this as well. I figured that with the unpredictable and constantly changing panning direction it will just get in the way.

In retrospect, I missed one thing. Olympus super tele zoom. While I'm happy with the performance of my Panasonic 100-300 II (which I consider good for a lens at this price point), I could not use ProCapture L with it. Which I think would at least partly solve the problem of excessive amount of photos of ultimately uninteresting moments. I was basically following the planes while shooting, not knowing if something worthy will happen or not. With ProCapture, I would only have shots around the interesting moments, I figure this would make things a bit easier.

So, to sum up my takeaways from shooting my first real airshow:

• electronic shutter rules
• lag-free live view with very short blackout rules
• shooting planes at slow shutter speeds is hard - I'd need a lot more practice to stop relying on spraying
• disable IS when following planes
• lower C-AF sensitivity seems to be working better for this
• AF limiter is useful
• all-area AF seemed less reliable than 5/9 point grid, so I didn't use it - I miss something in between or a custom AF grid like in Panasonic (not the first time I wish Olympus had that, actually)
• slow second memory slot is a travesty and whoever at Olympus decided to green light this cost cutting measure should burn in hell
• a single battery can last a few hours of shooting stills and video - I ended up with about 80 gigs before I had to switch to second battery at the end of the day

Now, for some photo evidence from the evening show at the beach (it was a free side-attraction to the main airshow which took place at the airport):

No idea if this was part of the plan or if the pyrotechnics had an unexpected burp.

Yak-3u R2000 piloted by Mateusz Strama

W-3WARM Anakonda during a demonstration of a rescue operation

I will be posting more shots in follow-up posts, as I am still going through the photos, selecting and processing.

C&C is welcomed.

Well done and nice recap. Similar to my experience with the same camera at an airshow. The "burn in hell" comment was funny. Not sure i would have went that far, but it is better than no 2nd slot

One of the attractions was an evening/night show. Light, music and pyrotechnics over the beach. Things got really interesting and cool once it got dark.

They also had fireworks which they shot while flying 

By the time those guys flew, it was really dark. You can't even make out what kind of plane it is, with all the motion blur. But I actually like this shot very much.

This one is a bit silly at 1/10 sec. I think I had IBIS enabled for this, which I suspect is the reason for the trails going horizontal.

A clear standout of the evening (to me at least) was a duo of Polish pilots in unusual planes.

Mateusz Strama piloted Yak-3u R2000, which is apparently an amalgamation of two soviet planes, Yak-11 and Yak-3.

And Artur Kielak was flying Sbach XA-41, a modern aerobatic aircraft, the only one in Poland apparently. Its paint job is a tribute to a legendary No. 303 Fighter Squadron from the times of WWII and Battle of Britain. This evening was just a taste of things to come next day. What this guy was doing in the air was just jaw dropping.

An approach from the side of setting sun.

A silhouette of Yak-3u

Those moments were hard to capture properly. This one could have been better.

Probably my favourite shot of that day, and one of the favourites from the whole show.

Another fly-by (not sure how this maneuver is called, actually). I like this one better.

Nothing special in this shot, but I like the smoke trails here, so it's in

Checked the other two post as well there. Darn good shots and nice work. Not easy I can imagine, so yeah, well done. You are right, practise, practise and more practise and in no time, you will wonder why it was so hard to start with That's normal and stubbornness and learning to relax when shooting are your best tools. It all becomes natural and automatic with the settings in time.

I love the way you have gone about it with a self analysis, you simply can't beat that. Congrats on fine results and work. I've never tried air shows, but man, it looks darn hard from here.

All the best.

Danny.

No, it's not a typo. Anakonda is the name of the helicopter that demonstrated a sea rescue operation (picking up a person from water). It's a specialized variant of Polish helicopter PZL W-3 Sokół (meaning Falcon) modified specifically for search and rescue operations on sea.

The demonstration took place after sun went down, when it was getting dark.

The pretend survivor ready to be hauled in in a "basket".

Looking at this photo, I'm thinking it's probably a rather terrifying experience getting airlifted like that.

Now it's time to pull in a rescuer. He was the one dropped into water beforehand to prepare the survivor for lifting. Now it's time for him to be picked up.

That looks like fun. NOT

Apparently, there's a special technique for entering back into the helicopter. Guessing, I have no idea.

daleeight wrote:

Well done and nice recap.

Thanks.

Similar to my experience with the same camera at an airshow. The "burn in hell" comment was funny. Not sure i would have went that far, but it is better than no 2nd slot

Yeah, it was a bit hyperbolic. But it is super annoying. For an event like that, I would like to shoot in the following way:

• have two fast cards in the camera
• camera set up so that the it saves to first slot and switches to the other one when the first card is full
• shooting, shooting, shooting
• when the camera switches to second slot, I take note but keep shooting 
• when I know I'll have a minute, I take out the full card and replace it with a fresh one

But no. It was something like: "WTH, why is it so slow? Why can't I change settings, why can't I go into playback? Oh, wait, first card is full. Need to change, hope nothing interesting happens..."

Of course, I could have bought a 128GB UHS-II card for insane amount of money so that I would not have to use the second slot.

nzmacro wrote:

I love the way you have gone about it with a self analysis, you simply can't beat that. Congrats on fine results and work. I've never tried air shows, but man, it looks darn hard from here.

All the best.

Danny.

Thank you, happy to hear that from you.

the night shots look great, they really are something different, most important thing about airshows is enjoying it, look forward to some more pictures

you did well, only comments are 1) you would benefit from 400mm, 2) I'm surprised with your happiness with the electronic shutter, I tend to avoid it because of rolling shutter fear but you seemed to have proved it is OK on the EM1-II.

No text.

BigBen08 wrote:

My Canon lenses have an IS mode 2 that stabilizes when panning. I found it works very well when shooting at slow speeds. I have experimented with mode 2 both on and off, and it is a benefit. Does Olympus have a similar mode?

Yes, both horizontal and vertical panning. I haven't really tried them, as most of the time I didn't know which direction I would be panning in a second. Nice thing about Canons is that they have the switches for those modes on the lenses, which makes it easier to switch between them when shooting. However, on Olympus it is possible to assign IS control to the button. Press the button to toggle IS on/off, hold the button and use the dial to change IS mode. But it did not occur to me to set it up beforehand.

From your photos it looks like you could use more FL. Maybe 400mm.

Yeah, that would not hurt. But would probably make things even trickier

Wu Jiaqiu wrote:

the night shots look great, they really are something different, most important thing about airshows is enjoying it, look forward to some more pictures

Yeah, and it was really quite impressive to watch, with fireworks and music. For one moment, I really wished I had a fish-eye lens. Of course, even if I did have it, it would do me no good as I had no idea there would be fireworks over the water, with colourfully lighted planes doing their sparkly thing in the air.

That was such an amazing opportunity for an ultra wide Live Composite shot.

Astrotripper wrote:

Wu Jiaqiu wrote:

the night shots look great, they really are something different, most important thing about airshows is enjoying it, look forward to some more pictures

Yeah, and it was really quite impressive to watch, with fireworks and music. For one moment, I really wished I had a fish-eye lens. Of course, even if I did have it, it would do me no good as I had no idea there would be fireworks over the water, with colourfully lighted planes doing their sparkly thing in the air.

That was such an amazing opportunity for an ultra wide Live Composite shot.

next thing you need is a decent set of step ladders lol.....i'm not joking either

Trevor Carpenter wrote:

you did well, only comments are 1) you would benefit from 400mm, 2) I'm surprised with your happiness with the electronic shutter, I tend to avoid it because of rolling shutter fear but you seemed to have proved it is OK on the EM1-II.

Shooting BIF with electronic shutter on E-M1 Mk2 produces very little rolling shutter problems.

Trevor Carpenter wrote:

you did well,

Thanks

only comments are 1) you would benefit from 400mm,

I'm sure I would. If Olympus cares to release one that would not ruin me, I'm in.

2) I'm surprised with your happiness with the electronic shutter, I tend to avoid it because of rolling shutter fear but you seemed to have proved it is OK on the EM1-II.

Yeah, I was a bit hesitant at first, but after some shooting it became clear that it will not be a big issue.

However, In my effort to try to find the limits of what I could do, I managed to get some samples that were clearly affected. So as promised in my OP, a little analysis follows.

This looks good until you notice that the spaces between propeller blurs are not exactly the same. Most people would probably not notice this.

The propeller is still quite blurry, but this looks a bit more iffy and probably a lot more people would notice that something is off. Still, not THAT bad.

Ok, this is so obvious that anyone would notice.

Conclusion? You're fine as long as you're able to nicely blur the propeller. How much will depend on how big part of the frame the propeller end up taking. In the above example, the plane fills the width of the frame almost completely. So it's close to the worst case scenario. For planes in the distance that don't fill the frame, it's not an issue at all.

Now, for helicopters.

Can you tell anything is wrong here? Looks good to me. I guess the rotors of big helicopters don't move fast enough.

Ultralight copter. The rotor is smaller and rotates faster, and it shows up in this bendiness caused by rolling shutter.

Faster shutter speed, you can still see the curvature to the blades cause by rolling shutter.

Conclusion? Not an issue for bigger helicopters with long rotor blades. A small issue for lighter copters with higher rotation speeds.

And finally, panning action.

Now, this is not a jet, so the panning wasn't super fast, but  you can imagine the plane was not exactly hovering over the ground. It was still a fast moving object. Lack of horizontal structures going through the whole height of the image  helps of course. But if there were any, I would not bother taking (or using) the shot. So this is kinda the best I have in terms of panning.

Conclusion? Panning is not a problem for airshows like the one I attended. I would probably be for something like Air Bull Air Race, where planes pass the poles at insane speeds. Oh yeah, for that, electronic shutter would not do, even as fast as the one on E-M1 II is.

Note: none of the photos above were processed in any significant way. Those are full frames scaled down to not waste bandwidth. Raw conversions with my default starter setting. The last one was straightened up to make evaluation easier.

Thanks for the summary.  I am seeing similar with the G9 in that rolling shutter is less of a problem but the problem hasn't gone away.  I shall stick to mechanical shutter for most of my shooting for now.