Here are the rest of my airshow pics.

[Grumpy Old Guy]

7. Thanks FuzzyRabbit.

I shot these at 1/2000th of a second. I was actually going to go faster, but the pro photographers I was shooting with talked me out of it. I'm still wondering if I did the right thing.

You are absolutely right about the Blue Angels. Those pics were by far the hardest to get right. I would say the planes were a bit lighter than Navy blue but not quite royal blue. The exposures were further complicated by the fact that they were the last event of the day, starting their routine about 3:30 P.M. The sun was getting lower and they were harshly backlit.

I generally prefer shooting RAW and adjusting the colors myself in Adobe Camera Raw. In this case I went a step further. I selected the jets in Photoshop using luminance masking. Then I brought the exposure and saturation up on them, leaving the rest of the image alone. If you look at the shot of the two jets over the lifeguard tower you'll see that the saturation is too hot.

I really enjoy the editing. I created some custom presets with the first few shots, which I could use for the rest of the images. However, they didn't help much with the Blue Angels shots. I had to do each one of those individually.

Grumpy