Photos from another Giant Scale R/C event

I've just finished my album from the weekends fun fly and the album link has been sent to the organizers & host club, and here's a few samples showing the variety of planes people spend a lot of hours & money on; and they sure enjoy talking about them.

These 2 general aviation samples were very accurate scale builds, and the Tri Pacer had to declare an emergency when the entire left elevator separated after a touch & go. It bounced a few times on the landing but he did land without further damage.

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And representing WW 1 we had some nice scale birds too.

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I forgot to mention that I shot the event with my 7d & 1Ds2 (and left the 1D2n in the car) and now that I've switched the 7D to Evaluative metering it's doing a very good job shooting the action. Originally I used Partial, but it wasn't doing very well when most of the shot was sky (1Ds2 is still using Partial). A good majority of 7D flying shots are with the 35-350 L which saw use on both bodies but for a while I tried the 70-200 f2.8 L IS on the 7D. Once again I'm very impressed with the versatility of the 35-350 L and I'll either buy another or go all out & spend the extra for a 28-300 L, but so far not having the IS doesn't seem to be a problem with the newer bodies letting you jack up the ISO as needed in low light.
On the down side I still find it very distracting looking through all the little AF squares of the 7D, but as long as it's getting the job done I keep using it for the extra reach / crop ability. (The 2 P-47's were shot with it & at quite a distance in poor light).

Good shots of some great looking models!

On a day like that I would have used manual, but the 7D doesn't seem to have had any problems with exposure as far as I can tell without the EXIF from the images.

I have to admit that I haven't even considered manual for these events, and I don't think it would work for me. My challenge is the constantly changing background, which goes from all sky to partial sky & then to trees / grass and at the same time trying to keep track of up to 5 planes so I can decide which one(s) to track while doing a low pass or touch & go etc. If there was only 1 in the air & I could communicate with the pilot it would work, but I think I'm far better served using Tv & exposure compensation. I even got brave & lowered my shutter speed for a while but all in all I think I need to be above 1/400 for sharp images even with the bigger & slower scale models such as the WW 1's & the Pipers.

On a gray sky day as that appears to be, the light isn't changing. I doesn't matter what the background is.

Oh it was gray all right, and in the late afternoon I had to use ISO 800 to keep shutter speeds where I wanted them. Agree that the light isn't changing, buy the meter sees it as very bright when it's seeing a lot of sky & the camera will be in the f11-f16 range, but once that sky becomes the dark trees the aperture needed changes rapidly, and since the camera can do that faster than me (by a big margin the win goes to the camera) Tv is the way to go. (based on MY skill level)

this demonstrates what I mean. Early in the morning when the light was good, a dead stick landing, ISO 400, 1/640, f11

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Maybe you should try this: Need an exposure crutch?

I'll give that a very careful read & then see how it works out. Thanks, Larry