One weekend, I was at Boeing Field awaiting something interesting.  There was the regular traffic of business jets and, since they were pretty standard fair and the light wasn’t great anyway, I figured I would play with dropping the shutter speed super low.  The R3 is great for this because I can select a frame rate of 30fps if I want.  When shooting with silly shutter speeds, really high frame rates increase the chance that I might get something that isn’t terrible.  Technology overcomes lack of talent!

I was dropping down to 1/50^th or 1/60^th of a second for some of the arrivals.  I was using a polarizer to take out a load of light to allow such low shutter speeds on a sunny afternoon.  It also didn’t hurt to reduce the glare with the sun so strong.  Most shots were worthless but there were a few that came out okay.  Full size there were more acceptable ones but, since I was experimenting, I focused on the ones that were really sharp.  Such low shutter speeds do result in parallax issues which is not ideal, so I tend to look for the sharpness to be on the front fuselage unless the plane is going well away from me.  There were some 737s on test too, so I played with the same techniques for them as well.  Maybe I shall go even lower at some point.