Photographing Aircraft

Hi, I have a quiry regarding taking pics of aircraft In flight(airways)

I have used a bridge camera for the main part for this, as with them being 10mp min and 600mm, It has ment achieving a fairly decent close-In Image with the added help of a little cropping, I know this can be achieved with far more IQ from a decent dslr set up, as long as a body/lens combo can be used with a convertor to reach 500-600mm but -
I was wondering If on a dslr/lens set up like mine 55-250 with a max reach of 400mm and not being able to fit/use a convertor, I will be relying on cropping to achieve 600mm plus, so In theory with the sensor In a 30d being more than 4 times larger than a bridge and superior lens, I should be able to crop more than 4 times what I could with a bridge and sum, to make up for the fov difference, possibly upto 100 x?

Any thoughts or Ideas....


P.

It would be a combination of sensor quality & field of view tables, wouldn't it?
I have to move this to "Talk".

Pagman wrote in post #15637653
Hi, I have a quiry regarding taking pics of aircraft In flight(airways)

I have used a bridge camera for the main part for this, as with them being 10mp min and 600mm, It has ment achieving a fairly decent close-In Image with the added help of a little cropping, I know this can be achieved with far more IQ from a decent dslr set up, as long as a body/lens combo can be used with a convertor to reach 500-600mm but -
I was wondering If on a dslr/lens set up like mine 55-250 with a max reach of 400mm and not being able to fit/use a convertor, I will be relying on cropping to achieve 600mm plus, so In theory with the sensor In a 30d being more than 4 times larger than a bridge and superior lens, I should be able to crop more than 4 times what I could with a bridge and sum, to make up for the fov difference, possibly upto 100 x?

Any thoughts or Ideas....


P.

And I suppose an other vairable Is the AF sucsess rate of sutch a small object, as surely before any processing In camera or Image size etc, the focusing and lens needs to be good enough to focus on It In the first place, would a dslr/lens with a smaller zoom be better and more accurate at this than a bridge with a longer lens?


P.

By airways do you mean taking photographs from the ground of an aircraft at cruise altitude? like 32,000 feel? There is a thread on contrails with stuff like this here

I'm not entirely clear on what you are trying to achieve, but if I were you, I'd rent a large prime lens. Canon's prime L's should give you much better IQ than the 55-250 and you'll need to crop less. The larger aperture will also benefit the camera's auto focus.

jwol wrote in post #15640721
I'm not entirely clear on what you are trying to achieve, but if I were you, I'd rent a large prime lens. Canon's prime L's should give you much better IQ than the 55-250 and you'll need to crop less. The larger aperture will also benefit the camera's auto focus.

I respect the advice but I'm not In a position to start renting lenses, especialy when I want the convenience of using my camera every day from home, It would be good however to see If there Is anyway round being able to use a convertor with my lens, I know the 55-250 Isnt supposed to be convertor usable, but someone may have an Idea?
I used my lens today but some shots of distant aircraft where quite dissapointing, when I cropped them even the pixal noise was becoming an Issue, despite the 30d ultra ultra clean record.

P.

Have you looked into the Rokinon 800mm or 500mm mirror lenses?