Came back to ol'Blighty, partly for this airshow. Attended on the Saturday, but the weather conditions were a bit challenging - I don't have as much experience in cloudy weather, and misjudged the metering (cloudy weather in Norway gives a lot less light) so I ended up shooting most of it in ISO 200, even though there was enough for 100.
Either way, I got a few good shots (I ended up with over 2400 photos by the time the battery ran out, about 15 minutes before they all went up) and experimented with getting prop blurring too. The contrails from the Yak were quite impressive too.
For prop blur, I followed the suggested 1/125 in the FAQ on shutter priority mode. Towards the end, I moved to a slightly quicker one around 1/160, which worked okay as well; you have to balance the slower shutter speed with the increased light going into the sensor/film. If there is a fair amount of light like I had, set the ISO to the lowest setting you can and hopefully with the shutter at 1/125 or 1/160 (maybe even faster depending on what the a/c is doing) and hopefully the F-stop will be in the sweet range (~8-11). I wouldn't go slower than 1/125 because tracking someone at (an effective) 450mm at such a slow speed is really hard; probably had about one GOOD shot for every 30 exposures (had a lot of marginal ones though). I spent most of my time alternating between aperture (to actually get 1 good photo) and shutter (to get prop blur).
Just FYI, that was all with a D60 and a Nikkor 70-300mm VR-ED; damn thing gets surprisingly heavy after a couple of hours, I don't know how you pros do it with Bigmas and the like!
EXIF says 1/1000 / 1/2000 for those frozen props Gopher..
Yep, thats right. This is my first time shooting aircraft with prop blur specifically in mind (and the first time not shooting in "auto" at an airshow) so I was a little insecure - had to do a few high-speed ones to curtail my paranoia. I do feel a bit silly doing that, because I don't usually move the mode wheel while shooting; I accidentally shifted it to Manual a couple of times, which screwed up a few shots. Still a bit new at this.
