Good Plane Spotting settings for my Camera?

NiallJS99

What are good plane spotting settings for my Camera?
I have a Fujifilm S2750HD bridge camera. If you need any further information please ask me.

Here are some example photos I took:

Danbo!

Nice shots, I think it's the dull weather having more of an impact rather than settings!

There aren't any real 'universal' settings for plane spotting, although having said that, with the weather generally grey in Ireland you can rely on some settings!

I'm not sure how much control you have over your camera, I assume as a bridge you have quite a bit. I tend to use aperture priority on my camera and set it as low as it will go (low F number), letting the camera decide on shutter speed. Usually on days that are greyer than others, I'll bump the ISO up to 200 or 400, though my camera handles this quite well (along with most modern cameras) When you start to use higher ISOs, you introduce noise into the mix.

The main issues with plane spotting is distance. You need a lens with good reach, but with that comes trade-offs. Unless you are spending €1000's on a lens, most affordable (€200-400) long reach lens have small apertures at their longest settings. My Sigma 70-300mm at 300mm it's F5.6. This means less light onto the sensor so either I bump up ISO or Shutter speed. I tend to go to ISO rather than shutter because at 300mm, any movement is more pronounced and you get motion blur.

You can play around with exposure settings depending on weather. Playing around is really the best thing you can do to learn more. I like to take a few static shots of aircraft at gates from a distance to get the right settings on the day. It can be hard to see the quality on a small display though, so it isn't until you get home and look at them on a computer that you really see how well you did.

Best thing to do is keep practicing and taking a look at the EXIF data of your photos to see what settings worked and try again the next day. Also a bit of playing with settings in photoshop later to enhance them a little. If your camera can shoot in RAW format, don't ever shoot in JPEG ever again. Raw will give you a much wider range of possibilities when editing.

Heres some of my shots taken with a relatively cheap DSLR (D40 and D3200) and Sigma 70-300mm lens. For those interested, the D40 was about €350 about 6 years ago so probably cheap enough second hand, the D3200 was €450 about 4 months ago and the Sigma lens was €220 about 4 years ago (now only £110 on amazon)

NiallJS99

Thank You for your reply. I will try this out. I don't really know to much about cameras. A DSLR is out of my budget but I have considered upgrading to This Camera. I am tempted by the D3200 though.