Contrail Spotting

Hi!

I try to take pictures of airliners in cruising altitude (30 to 40 000 ft) with my 55-250mm lens. The result is correct but not excellent, do you have tips for the settings I should use or for the post-processing?

Thanks!

For Contrail Spotting I would guess you need at least a good 500mm Lenses, for any good quality!

For contrail spotting I usually use a SIGMA 50-500mm lens, this is one of the example, I don´t remember how much was the altitude, but I think it was above 35.000ft

Attached photos:

This picture was taken using a 120-400mm lens

Attached photos:

Hi,

I've got one using a Sigma 150-500mm lens.

@snao12 lucky you catching the A350 in Carbon Livery!

Attached photos:

@Samuel Lavoie, I forgot to mention that this photo is also cropped. The aircraft is not that big on a 500mm RAW file. My suggestion is to buy a 80-400 and 2x converter (160-800) for Nikon body and if you have a Canon body, a 100-400 (200-800) and a 2x converter. If you want to do so, please check out the compatibility of the converter to the camera/leneses. I hope this information was helpful.

Cheers!

I am using the Nikon D7100 with Sigma sport 150-600mm. And cropping the pictures

/Bjarne

Attached photos:

Thank you all for your answers.

Great shots by the way!

In case you are considering changing your lens, it depends on what kind of pic you want, if you want to be able to count all the bolts on the fuselage or you are ok with smaller planes. You can take a look at my gallery, I've taken contrails at 200, 400 and 400+2x mm. Lately, I'm using an old manual 400 mm f5.6 prime lens, sometimes combined with a crappy 2x converter. For sure a 150-600 lens is much more usable, but maybe those 600 mm are not as sharp as expected (never tested that lenses...).

Be careful if you are thinking of buying a 2x converter, because it also doubles the aperture, so in my case, I end up using an 800 mm f11.2 lens. Cameras usually stop focusing with apertures smaller than f8, and focus manually at such long distances with an AF lens is not as easy as it seems. Using a 2x converter also swallows 2 stops of light, so you will have to increase ISO from (i.e.) 200 to 800, and increase the shutter speed due to the "longer" lens to avoid blurry images.

About settings, you can check the exif of my pictures, and about post processing, unless you are a full/staff member, it's not easy to get a pic accepted with a blue sky, because of the digital noise. If you denoise the sky too much, you'll probably get banding or jpeg compression, if not, "digital noise is visible". That's why lots of contrail pics in here have black skies. It's also more tricky than usual to find the balance between sharpness and jagged edges because the "main object" is small, so I use the clone stamp tool and the unsharp mask until I feel that the screeners may accept the photo.

BTW, have you thought about getting a bridge camera with a huge optical zoom like Nikon P900 or something like that? There are some facebook groups about contrailspotting where you can find members (like another AP member, Marin Ečo) that use bridge cameras. Check that out, maybe the image quality is enough for you and that's not as expensive as a big lens...

Hope it helps. Regards.

Thanks a lot Manuel Dominguez , I will take a look at your pictures!