A great day for R/C photography.

Saturday was our annual Zone Fun Fly. The idea is for all the clubs in the zone to get involved & for their members to attend making it a relatively big fun fly with pilots of every skill set from long time expert to fresh beginner using a buddy box to learn. This years event seemed to lack the usual number of pilots for the start of the day but many more came as the day progressed. Some blamed the potential for rain & thunderstorms while others say interest seems to be fading due to many variables. Either way once the sun got up behind me I noticed nice puffy clouds forming along the horizon & I encouraged pilots to try to fly their low passes using the clouds for the background.

Good job getting focused locked on them. I shot rc cars once and it was not easy getting sharp images.

That was a great idea & it makes a ton of difference to me!

FW 190. Such a pretty aircraft.

Great set, you did a grand job with these.

Nice work. P51D is one of my favourite airplanes.

Thanks again everyone. That last photo is of a very basic foamie with about a 40 inch wingspan but it just fits into the background like a full scale. Those cloud formations turned average photos into what could be very nice magazine covers. I've got a 2 week break & then it's one of my biggest events each summer.

Very cool, would love to find something like that around here - need to look into that!

I would love to see the old warplanes processed in black and white too, I think that would look way cool!

Thanks. According to your profile you are in Chicago so this should help

http://www.rc-airplane-world.com …is-rc-airplane-clubs.html

Clubs are usually happy to find a serious photographer willing to shoot their events but like everything there's a learning curve to getting good in flight photos & their trust for flight line access.

Thanks for the link - trust and respect are earned, if I get the chance I will certainly do my best!

You're welcome. When I first got invited to do an event there wasn't much info on settings etc so after doing it for a few years I wrote this guide to help other get started.

http://www.rccanada.ca …m/showthread.ph​p?t=147971

Hopefully it will help with settings etc but good smooth pans come from practice.

Excellent set of photos and good job with the prop blur.

I've done some R/C aircraft shooting and it can be challenging. Those little planes can fly very fast - it's hard to keep up with them.
And it's especially demanding when using slow shutter speeds for the prop blur.

You did a very good job!

Well to be truthful you can shoot them at much faster shutter speeds than full scale although some big gassers revert to a rather slow idle for landings. I've shot at 1/800 and got good results but in general stick at 1/500 for most shots (1/320 MAX for heli's). When there's a nice background I may slow down for panning blur.

cicopo wrote in post #17660377
You're welcome. When I first got invited to do an event there wasn't much info on settings etc so after doing it for a few years I wrote this guide to help other get started.

http://www.rccanada.ca …m/showthread.ph​p?t=147971

Hopefully it will help with settings etc but good smooth pans come from practice.

Another big "Thank You" for your write up.... Checking out the RC Club info, and your guide!

Mark

if you did not know at first you would think they were full size aircraft