Manfred, I was a shutter bug many many moons ago, when SLR's were king. But just in case you or someone out there wants to take pictures of models in flight there are a couple of things I do that may help you or maybe you can tell me of something I'm doing wrong, but here goes.

First and most important, these pictures were taken by Bill Tozer, The P-40 was me, and he did a great job! He was using a Camcorder that can take still shots. The reason we are using a camcorder is because we are cranking the shutter speed into the 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/4000, 1/10000 speed. The bigger the lenses the more light they let in the faster shutter speed one can use. Try a fast shutter speed with your little 15mm lens digital camera and the pic's will be very dark and grainy. With a photo editing program and some experience you can take most of the darkness away and make those photo's look good. But camcorders that take stills give us a large lens which lets in enough light that we don't get the dark until we get to 1/10000 shutter speed and then we loose the corners the center of the picture is still good. That's what we have experienced on ours.

Nothing is for free and the camcorder is no acceptation, the storage of the shots is so slow that we can only get one per pass. So we need to take equal numbers of shots arriving, in front of us, and leaving. But the object was to take good digital pic's for under $400.00. Some day I'd like to try a digital SLR but they have to come way down in price first.

It took me a long time to figure out how to change the shutter speed in the camcorder because all the adjustments were in the moving picture side and not all will carry over to the still pic's side. And only trial and error will tell for each individual unit.

Joe