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I'm not expert, but since nobody else has replied to you, this is my 2 cents worth. I think the D40 will be no different to any other camera, perhaps with 2 exceptions. 1) it's a small, light camera and may not balance well with larger lenses. 2) you can't use Af lenses with it, only AF-S, so that rules out the standard airshow lens, the 80-400, at least if you wanted to use it in AF mode. Apart from that, here's a few thoughts
* You want the longest lens you can get for ground to air shots. 300mm absolute minimum, so something like a 70-300 VR would be a good, relatively inexpensive choice, or for possibly better photo quality, a 80-200 f/2.8 AF-S with a 1.4 TC to give you 280mm (you can also take the TC off and have a fast indoors lens that way). If you wanted to spend more, you could get something like a 300 f/4 AF-S and add a choice of TC's - 1.4x or 1.7x, or 2.0x but the 2.0x might be pushing the AF on a D40. Even with the 1.7x, remembering to add the crop factor, you are getting like 765mm. Others will have lens suggestions for you as well. I am not sure if the Sigma 50-500 will focus on the D40 or not but that's popular too.
* For jets, go ahead and crank up the shutter speed - you might consider using A mode and locking an appropriate aperture. For prop aircraft I would try for 1/250 or 1/320, to keep a nice blurred prop, but that takes practise to keep the plane sharp at that speed. For choppers I use 1/125 or 1/160, and it's even more of a challenge!! Keep the ISO low for both props and choppers, or you end up with ridiculous apertures like 1/32 which rob sharpness.
* I'd shoot the highest quality JPG so you have more potential for cropping and retaining the highest photo quality
* Keep the drive mode on continuous high, and the AF on AF-C, and fire a burst starting just before the thing you want to capture, then pick the best shot later, or you'll miss the action by the time you hit the shutter. I don't know about the D40, but you may be able to reassign the AF to another button, then you can AF with your thumb and you don't have to keep the shutter button halfway down all the time.
* Buy the most memory cards you can afford, and the fastest too - speed is not an issue for shooting but for downloading later, it's too painful with slow cards once you've experienced a fast card!!!
Edit: * Metering: If you can fill the frame with airplane, then I found matrix metering is just fine. The problem comes when you have a lot of sky, that will confuse the metering leading to underexposure. If you find that you have this problem, then you can 1) fill more of the frame with plane which you should have done in the first place, or 2) switch to centre weighted or spot metering. I haven't really used centre weighted much, I suspect it might work better than spot metering, depending on what colour the plane is painted, believe it or not.
Edit: * If you can get a battery grip for the D40 I'd recommend getting one. It adds a bit of weight which helps balance the big lenses, it gives your little finger somewhere to sit, it adds LOTS of extra shooting time, and it looks sexier
Edit: * My (possibly advanced level) tip for avoiding missing the action, and assuring great exposures: Switch your image review on at the start of the day, shoot a few test shots of stuff flying around, make sure the histograms look good - make sure they don't run up against the right side too hard - and then switch the review off and get shooting. If your metering is working okay then you really don't need to look at the LCD as you can't gauge sharpness or exposure (other than clipping that is) out in the field off sucky LCDs, although Nikon probably has an advantage over Canon there.
Originally posted 47 months ago.
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chris ( in awe of analogue ) edited this topic 47 months ago.
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Hi,
All in all, I agree with what has been said. A 70-300 vr seems good indeed. For my 2 cents: I am not an expert but took my D40 with an old 80-200 zoom to an airshow near Paris recently. This meant I had MF and no metering. I did not feel too challenged by the situation, although a longer lens and VR would have been handy sometimes. Fortunately, the planes were quite close at this meeting.
My exposition setting was not always optimal, but that was more due to my lack of experience than to the lack of metering. When the planes are flying, they catch more light than on the ground (at least for the not ideal lighting conditions I had). I doubt that full automatic metering would have done so much better though.
The manual focusing was not so much of a problem.
Some pics here:
flickr.com/photos/bw94/sets/72157605385004968/
To sum up, yes, the D40 is a very good camera, and also should work for airshows.
Posted 47 months ago.
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