October 2025
For National Day, the air force squadrons do flyovers for the military parade in Madrid. Lucky me — I live right near one of the airfields where the demo teams take off. Four days (count ’em) after buying the camera, I headed to the end of the runway to see if I could snag a few shots. The day looked pretty ugly — no rain threat, but cloudy with wild light swings. Honestly I figured with my RF-S18-150mm I wouldn’t get anything decent, but you gotta try.
First frames
After a long wait we started hearing the squadrons that were in the Madrid parade, and since they still had a few passes left, they looped pretty close to where I was. Got some shots, but on the camera they looked rough — heavy backlight turned the planes into black blobs, tough to recover. So I started fiddling with the settings, deliberately overexposing to pull max shadow detail, knowing I’d have to edit for sure — so the base had to be the RAW file, no other way. I set spot metering with vehicle autofocus (the R10 doesn’t have a specific airplanes setting) and tracking, but I forgot to switch AF to SERVO 😔 . The idea was that metering would, with luck, land on the fuselages. Sure, more shutter speed would’ve helped, but hey — I did pretty well just remembering where the settings were… 😅
Shot of the day
As the passes were wrapping up, some of the planes started landing, coming into the end of the runway where I was. Coming in low like that — even almost head-on — you had to be quick with the camera. Lucky for me, the “Mirlo” patrol flies light prop planes, and they came in real close on approach, so I could get relatively tight shots for my 150mm (240mm equivalent on a FF camera). The fun part — and I only noticed when I edited — is that the co-pilot was waving at us, ha ha ha. Zoom in and you’ll see the hello.
Photobones: not too shabby for a newbie, but PhotoNotes would’ve helped you remember all the settings. Next time follow the setup guide.