I'm back at it again

[I_Fly]

Been shooting airplanes again, finally.

I had surgery on a finger about a month ago to repair a tendon damaged when I broke the finger last fall. It's made holding and shooting any camera, much less my 1D difficult. Well, it's healed enough that getting back out there is proving to be good therapy. It gets my mind off the pain, and discomfort and is also helping strengthen the hand and finger. Anyone that has held a 1D knows it's not a petite camera!

I've been wanting to get out and test my 75-300 USM IS lens again with panning shots. Right before the surgery I had taken about 30 shots (hey it's a 1D!) of a guy flying by in his homebuilt airplane. Beautiful day, good light, set up my stance, fired away. All but one picture...out of focus. I was stumped. I was shooting shutter priority, 1/125, same lens I shot on my A2, same stance/technique but results were horrible. Anyway, I read, somewhere online, that someone else had a similar problem that went away when they took their CP filter off the lens. So I wanted to try it.

Finally had the opportunity the other day. We had someone doing low, high speed passes down the runway at the airport I work at so I went out and shot 50+shots of several passes. Same settings, no CP filter. Probably 90% of the shots were in focus or very nearly in focus. Weird. Don't know why it makes such a huge difference but it did. I was just VERY relieved that it wasn't the camera!

Anyway, here are a couple of photos from those passes. Let's see if I remember how to post photos here!