GEM 63 Booster-07-6017

Hi David, After looking through some of these images I chose this one to comment on. Not sure why, perhaps the clarity which is very good considering the mile you were away from your subject. And it is an interesting subject as well. I was wondering what lens you used with your Nikon D7100 and D810 to get these images. This one seems closer...............................BR, Holger

Holger, thanks for viewing and commenting. I had my Nikkor 70-300mm/4-5.6 on the D5100 for video. I had the Nikkor 200-500mm/5.6 on the D7100 for auto exposures at 3 second intervals. I had my Nikkor 24-85mm/3.5-4.5 on the D810, handheld. My reasoning was thus: The D5100 would capture video at 1080P, there was no real improvement by using a higher-resolution body for the same quality of video. I put the 200-500 on the D7100 to take advantage of the crop factor/higher pixel density. I know I wouldn't be moving the long telephoto much, if at all, so I could set the camera to run and leave it. I put the 24-85 on the D810 because I knew I would want a zoom with wider angle that could adjust framing, composition, and focal length over the course of the test. How this would evolve was unpredictable, so I planned to cope shooting hand held. Most everything worked the way I wanted. The clarity you see is simply the not-too-long focal length. Any of the D7100 detail images is clearly heavily distorted by heat shimmer. FYI, this image was captured at the moment the engine fired. I think I'll try and develop this approach if I can manage to be there for the next test, sometime this summer.

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Holger, this one seems closer than a mile because I cropped a bit in PP. Here's the original, full frame image: