Airshow photography.....CPL or ND filter choice(s)???

Hi All


Right the commonest issue I have had at airshows when the light is very bright/sunny is that to get good prop blur using ISO 100 at 1/125 of a second I end up with something like f11

Now my sensor is thankfully nice and clean so apart from the possibliity of dust bunnies making their presence known IMO f11 is pushing any lens off its sweet spot and on occassions I wish I could shoot wide open e.g. f4 or f5.6

So bearing in mind the flightlines vary and a CPL works best AFAIK when you have found the extinction point all the CPL is going to do is act like an ND filter therefore is it better to simply (?) have an ND 4 and ND 8 to hand for the purpose of getting more control over the aperture?

TIA for any insight

At 90 degrees from the sun, it will still give you bluer skies, if you're lucky enough to have them, so I'd go with the CPL.

It may remove some nice highlights from the aircraft too, or introduce rainbows in the canopy, so try it out on some on the ground & see if that's OK with you.

The only issue I can see using a CPL over the ND, is that you will constantly have to adjust the CPL when going from vertical to horizontal orientations. But then again, you would have to change ND's or exposure when the lighting changes significantly also. Which one works best depends on the given situation.

Ie, shooting from the back of a planes drop bay doing air to air shots, the lighting is probably pretty consistent, and a ND will allow you to switch from vertical or horizontal composition without adjusting your exposure. A CPL you will have to rotate the front element of the filter each time you recompose from vertical or horizontal.

In contrast, if you are shooting a flight line from the ground, and you panning from right to left, or if clouds are moving in and out constantly, its probably easier to rotate the front element as needed, rather than swapping out ND filters.