By Angad Singh
Now before anyone reaches for the phone to raise the authorities, allow me to clarify. I shoot planes with a camera.
Ok, that was a pretty awful pun. I’ll stop there.
I’ve been a huge military/aviation geek for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was the only oddball in the house who actually enjoyed waking up to the sweet strains of jet engines early on Saturday mornings. I got into photography in a big way two years ago {early 2010}, after purchasing a Canon EOS 50D and a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens practically on a whim. At the time, I was driven more by an obsessive need to document things around me than anything else.
A few months of trial-and-error ensued, until my cousin {who’d actually studied photography} stepped in and gave me some pointers. My photos went from casual snapshots to images with some modicum of artistic merit. I posted them on Flickr, where I received a few polite comments and {more importantly} some brutally critical opinions.
By that time, I had my first opportunity to seriously photograph airplanes, however, my skills behind the camera had improved only modestly. Full of enthusiasm, I attended my first air show in the summer of 2010, but it turned out that I was woefully under-prepared. It’s one thing to wander around a city and shoot static subjects –architecture, people and places– and quite another to get some halfway-decent shots of a tiny fighter doing nearly a thousand kilometres an hour! I did get a few keepers from that trip, but I vowed to attend more shows and get better pictures.
{US Navy Super Hornet, Santa Maria}
{North American T-28 Trojan, Santa Maria}
{CH-53 KC-130J Refuel, San Diego}
{Blue Angels Tight Diamond, San Diego}
{F-22 Raptor Afterburner, San Diego}
By that time my backpack had expanded to include a battery grip for my camera {probably my favourite accessory – I never take it off} and a Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS telephoto zoom lens. I would later find out that the old adage of “it’s the photographer that makes the photograph” only holds partially true for aviation photography. Gear is vital.
- - The first and most important thing is a long focal length {200mm and up} lens. Zoom lenses afford extra flexibility, but sometimes at the cost of image quality.
- - A reasonably fast {f/4 apertures or wider} lens. The more light the lens lets in, the easier it is to keep the shutter speed high and “freeze” motion.
- - The camera body is slightly less crucial but there are certain things that set a good body apart from the rest. The things to watch out for are the autofocus module, which will affect how quickly and accurately your subject will come into focus; the burst rate, or how quickly the camera can take a succession of shots; and the ergonomics, which is one of the most under-considered aspects of buying a camera. If you’re carrying a 5kg+ camera-lens combination at some windswept airfield trying to nail a shot of a speeding jet, it helps to have something that fits your hand and is easy to use.
The shots I got at my first few shows are what motivated me to be more focused when shooting. My biggest lessons were to be careful, attentive and quick. Above all, shooting planes got me off my lazy backside and prompted me to dive into the deep end of post-processing digital images; I was so in awe of the aircraft that I desperately wanted my pictures to do them justice.
From then on, I was regularly interrupting my photowalks around campus and the city to head to LAX to shoot commercial airliners. I made trips to more shows the following year and even found an excuse to travel to Seattle for a week to shoot at the Boeing production facility there.
{Saab Formation, Sweden}
What you see above is where my love for taking pictures of planes has brought me. I went to Sweden at the end of May this year to attend a conference and air show commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Swedish aircraft manufacturer, Saab AB. Saab has been making planes since the Second World War, and military jet aircraft since the 1940s. The “Historic Flight” – a formation of all the combat jets that Saab has ever manufactured was the biggest draw of the show, and I was determined not to mess anything up. This shot was taken at 105mm with a shutter speed of 1/800sec and an aperture of f/5.6, with the ISO set at 320. It was a gloomy, overcast morning, so my settings were not ideal. Had I been shooting into a clear sky on a sunny day, I would have shot at a faster shutter speed {I try to stay above 1/1000 seconds as much as possible} and a lower ISO. Most of the lenses I use do not benefit too much from stopping down the aperture, so I tend to keep the aperture value between f/5.6 and f/8.
In these shots, I exposed correctly for the aircraft, which left me with a bright white overexposed sky. I spent a few minutes with the file in Adobe Lightroom to make the aircraft stand out a little more and the sky a little darker, to more accurately evoke the overcast nature of the day. This picture quite clearly illustrates why I prefer zoom lenses over fixed ones. Had I been out that day with only a 300mm or 400mm lens for distant shots of aircraft in flight, I would never have been able to fit this large, low-flying formation of aircraft into one frame.
{Saab JAS39 Gripen 2, Sweden}
{Saab JAS39 Gripen, Sweden}
{Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk, Sweden}
On returning to India, I’ve joined a research organization involved specifically in aviation and defence, and a lot of my work involves covering aerospace-related events. Aviation photography in India is a tiny field, and the legal aspects of photographing aircraft of any kind, be they civil or military, are daunting to say the least. That’s why one of the things I love most about my job is that it serves up regular opportunities to take pictures that elude most photographers {and aviation enthusiasts} in the subcontinent. So if you see a figure silhouetted against the evening sky on a rooftop in Delhi, pointing something at planes coming in to land, don’t be alarmed, it’s likely just someone like me, taking pictures of one of mankind’s coolest achievements.
{Embraer Legacy 650, Hyderabad}
{Dassault Falcon 7X, Hyderabad}
{Airbus, Delhi}
For more of Angad’s photography, have a look at his Flickr Page here | http://www.flickr.com/photos/angad84
About the Author | Angad Singh is a researcher and journalist based in New Delhi. He enjoys writing, photography and woodworking. He is also a dangerously addicted video-gamer. Not exactly an outdoorsy person, he does enjoy a game of golf now and again.
