No, It's not all done with mirrors

[Monkey Boy]

Sometimes you can get lucky, and the shutter opens at *just* the right moment!

Temora (central NSW Australia) Aviation Museum, hold a flying day evey 4 to 6 weeks, with their spitfire & othr vintage warbirds.

Sometimes guests turn up, like these:

The Royal Australian Air Force display team, the Roulettes
and the Taipans, the Navy helicopter display team.
A good show.

[The camera is a boring old low speck Panasonic Lumix FZ-30, with 12x optical zoom - and an annoyingly slow autofocus - which is why capturing these pictures at just these precise moments feels fo magical!]

[Thy King]

Nice photo's. But they have quite a grainy/fuzzy look. Did you use digital zoom? Or is this the autofocus acting up?

[Monkey Boy]

Yeah, they are a little grainy, there has been some cropping of the photos - intent was to size them for the letterbox format of my computer screen as potential wallpapers.
There has been no digital enhancement though - no noise reduction post mortem.

If you take a look through web reviews of my camera, you will see that is it regarded as a somewhat noisy camera.
It is a good proof of the fact that more megapix does not a better camera make. (it has 8mgpix) Although one of the first compacts (non DSLR) to come with shake reduction in the form of mechanical image stabilization , all quite commom now, but a rarity on a not prosumer>professional camera at the time.
It is a 35mm=>420mm equiv 12x optical zoom, I always disable the digital zoom on my cameras and if needed look to cropping later rather than digital zoom at the time.

The noise is therefore a combination of my lack of ability and the camera's inherient noisy tendancy.
There will also be the fact that the camera is not really fit for purpose - it is not meant to track rapidly moving objects, as like most compacts, it is really meant for tourist landscapes and potraits, not sporting events. Likewise the images are taken at full zoom, while handheld, with nothing but a reduced coffee intake & the image stabilizer to hold the camera steady - tracking looping aircraft with a tripod, or even a monopod is usually just a pain in the a@se.

Also, I have a slightly slower shutter speed, because you should never totally freeze the propeller of an aircraft in flight, as a frozen propeller with no motion blur makes the entire plane look like a static model.

Yeah, a poor carpenter will always blame his tools, but what can I say?

I'll probably run the pictures through my imaging software at some stage and process them, but I am generally not a fan of this, prefering a raw photo, for better or worse.

cheers,