That's going to be a tough shot in ANY circumstance. Below, for those who feel like like doing WAY too much reading for an RC board, is some explanation:

EVERY photograph has a "depth of field". In fact, your own eyes do...and for the same reasons. DOF is, essentially, the "depth" of the space in which things are in focus.

For example : Put your hand in front of your face, and then look at the television in the background. You'll see that you can focus on one or the other, hand or TV, but not both. One will be blurry. That's "depth of field" in action. You eyes have a certain "box" of space they can focus on....say, for example, 2 feet. (Just a random number made up for the example, obody yell at me *heh*) So...pick a point...your hand...and anything within, say, 2 feet of it, will be in focus. but anything outside of that 2' "box"...the television, 10-15' away for example, will be out of focus.

Cameras do the same thing. What most effects their depth of field is the aperture we talked about earlier. The larger the aperture (the more light you're letting in...remember, that's a SMALLER F number), the SMALLER, or "shallower" the depth of field.

Now, this is a good thing in some cases...take a look, for example, at the portrait and first hockey picture in my first post. Note that both of them have a very specific focal point.

In the hockey pic, the Predators player is in focus...but our depth of field is SO shallow that even his opponent, only SLIGHTLY closer to the lens, is slightly blurry...and the ref in the background is quite blurred. That's a GOOD thing in this case. Why? Simple...I'm a predators fan, and i shoot for other Preds fans. We don't CARE about the ref (in more ways than one), and care ONLY enough about the opponent to want to know that he's there, and our player is working hard to battle him. So...the focus of the image...both literally and figuratively, is on the player we care about.

The portrait is an even more startling example. Look close...that DOF is so shallow that even the model's own HAIR starts falling out of focus to the back...and the background is VERy blurred. Again...EXACTLY what we want...her FACE is what we're after there...the hair is just a frame for it to isolate it, and the background needs be no more than and "Ah, yes, pleasant" thing. Provided there's no tree growing out of her head, we don't really care WHAT is in the background.

Now...let's talk about the aperture for a minute in more detail.

Remember...the aperture is the hole we're letting light through...bigger the hole (smaller F number) the more light...smaller the hole, the less light. Remember the faucet example earlier? Well..guess what...the larger the aperture, the LESS TIME it takes to get enough light to make a photograph.

That's what we want, right? We're shooting airplanes...they're "small" (in terms of how much of our field of view they take up...yes, even a 40%er), and they're fast! So, we want that shutter to open and close QUICK. We don't want the airplane to have much time to move through our field of vision while the shutter's open, otherwise it'll be blurry. (ANY one of us who's EVER tried to shoot an airplane in flight knows what THAT looks like). So...we open that aperture up, and try to get LOTS of light in quick, so the airplane doesn't go very far while the shutter's open.

But dangit...remember what large aperture does? It DECREASES our depth of field.

And guess what...your pilot is 20' away, your airplane is 50' away. Your depth of field is a whole BUNCH less than 30 feet. Sooooooooooooo.....

Open the aperture enough to freeze the airplane...and it's IMPOSSIBLE for both it and the pilot to be in focus.

Close the aperture enough that the plane and pilot are in focus...and that airplane will travel a few zipcodes worth of blur while the shutter's open, because we're not letting much light in.

Open it back up, focus on the airplane...and you've got this fantastic shot of an airplane...with a blob of a pilot in front of it. Focus on the pilot...and he's flying a smudge in the distance.

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Here's where you get to make some artistic decisions:



Or perhaps




Pretty much the same pic, right? Shot from behind a pilot who's hovering his airplane. TOTALLY different stories though, aren't they? Simply because one is focused on the pilot, the other on the airplane.

Is one "better" than the other? No..not really...they are what they are. They're moments of time that suggest a story. What story is pretty much up to you.