Photography is one of the most common hobby among others. To start taking pictures, it’s enough to have a smartphone with a camera with a fair quality at hand — the rest, even skill, comes with experience. However, the more often and better a person photographs, the more expensive the necessary gadgets become. It all starts with the purchase of a professional camera. Then a huge number of accessories are bought for it.
And then the photographer begins to photograph specific things, narrowing the specialization - landscapes, animals, people. fast moving cars and even airplanes. In this article we will talk about the latter, and we will figure out how to photograph planes and which camera is best for this.
What the plane spotting itself is and how to deal with it?
Taking pictures of flying planes or simply plane spotting is somewhat complicated. It’s not always simply taking pictures of some random flying planes — sometimes it’s highly ordered in terms of picking right angle of one particular plane, catching its schedule and finding some good spot beforehand. It may sound a bit weird, but a lot of people can state that it’s fun.
Nevertheless, plane spotting can be done in various forms. Someone is using simple cameras, and someone is using pro cameras to take shots of lifting off or landing planes — it doesn’t matter because it’s a hobby. But if you’re the one who want to feel like a pro, you’ll need to buy a camera that’ll suit your needs. So, there are some specs for you to start with:
- Resolution. This one’s about overall camera resolution measured in megapixels and output image size. Think about it wisely so you’ll be able to take some high-quality pics even if they’re at the max zoom. Higher resolution will give your photos higher quality for sure.
- Sensor Size. Larger the sensor size means less noise on taken photo even on lower resolutions. It’s better to have 15 MP with larger sensor than 30 MP with smaller one.
- Focal Length. It’s literally about how much if the scene will your camera capture while focusing on it.
- Crop Factor. It determines how much larger or smaller the image will be compared to camera’s focal length. It’s useful to have this one high in case your camera got short focal length.
- High speed shooting. It must be good and really fast, just to be sure that you can rely on it while you’ll be taking pics of flying planes.
So, camera for plane spotting must match all those specs, and the higher means better by all means. High resolution, sensor size, focal length and crop factor will give you a perfect chance to take outstanding shots. So you’ll need a good by all means DSLR camera. And there are some of those cameras:
Fujifilm X-T30
Despite its really old-school look, this camera for plane spotting will give you a really great image quality mixed with astonishing experience. With its 23.5 mm CMOS sensor and 26 MP matrix this camera provides photos with up to 6240 x 4160 resolution. And, by the way, it’s really cheap compared to others — it’ll cost you less than $1000.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
One of the best choices for hobbyist photographers, suitable not only for plane spotting. 30 megapixel overall resolution supporting 4K photo output that can be even upscaled twice with Dual Pixel RAW post processing. Its 36mm CMOS sensor and DIGIC 6+ rapid shot system will give you even more possibilities. But it’ll also cost you about $2000 — that’s more than a lot of less powerful cameras. But it’ll do the job.
Nikon D750
Good by all means professional 24-megapixel camera with 35mm CMOS sensor and 6016 x 4016 overall output. It has one of the best available low-light quality and highly effective autofocus system, so it’ll suit you best if you want to catch some planes on your camera at dawn or right when the sun will go down
So, if we’re speaking about the best cameras for plane spotting — those above are ones that you would like to try yourself. But you must remember that you’ll need to buy a lot of accessories in addition to it — from a variety of lenses to tripod and such. And you’ll need a lot of time to properly adjust its settings so it’ll suit your needs in a best possible way, giving you much more fun from your own hobby.