Bournemouth Air Festival

Two shots of the Red Arrows at Bournemouth yesterday. I really wanted good shots of the Spitfire and Hurricane, but sadly neither came close to the crowd, preferring stay further offshore. Too far away for my 100-400L and 1.4x converter.

The Red Arrows were the real stars, nothing else really impressed me.

In the second shot, the clear blue sky shows pattern noise which surprises me. Yes, my old 30D used to suffer with it, but I thought that Canon would have solved the issue on the 5D2. This was not shot using extreme ISO's, its ISO200 for goodness sake.

Once you recognise it, its apparent in both shots.

nice shots, but they are noisy unless that grainy look was something you added in PP, are they extreme crops?

Rick,

Not extreme crops at all, I've trimmed the original 3:2 ratio to my preferred 4:3 (ish) one but thats about it. And no, I've certainly not added noise, in fact this has some of the noise removed, originally it was worse than you see here.

I've suffered from pattern noise with my 30D as I said, its ruined an otherwise nice series of early morning shots by affecting the deep shadow areas. But it shocks me to see it in an early afternoon late summer sky in a 5D2.

That sensor has to be out of specifications. I only see that much with the 20D at night & ISO 1600.

Heres another, cropped a bit harder, this is about 60% of the original frame and angled up on the left down on the right. The pattern noise is apparent in the dark cloud on the lower left. It's a problem I think I'm going to have to live with, as otherwise I like the 5D2 and have not seen any of the AF issues others complain of.

This was shot while two Hawks were displaying seperately, doing head to head runs and barrel rolling around one another while doing so.

I'd still send it in. Expecting some noise in the darker areas is normal, but compare it with this 20D ISO 1600 night shot w/out NR?

I like the first shot, it has a moody dramitic feel to it.

Even though you can't see the colour of the planes, the distintive shape of the Hawk and the formation flown leaves the shot with 'Red Arrows' written all over it!

Chris

There's definitely something weird going on there Richard - there's no way a 5D2 image should come out like that.

I see the image size on these is 43KB. Looks like some aggressive compression at work.

Mark,

Certainly the TIFFS are far larger, trust me. But the pattern noise is just as noticable before the POTN size requirements and then "save for web" shrank them to nothing.

And Chris, many thanks for your comment. I also think its the best of the bunch.