Jeff Cable's Blog: October 2023

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Photographing the Blue Angels Over San Francisco!

The weekend before last was Fleet Week in San Francisco and the main attraction is always the Navy Blue Angels. I have photographed them before, but it has been 5 years since I have made it to the show. This year I made it a priority to get back there to capture new images of these amazing pilots in action.

A lot has changed in the last 5 years, and I wanted to try my newer camera gear. Last time I photographed the Blue Angels, I was using the Canon 1DX MKII DSLR camera and I really wanted to try photographing the same subjects with the Canon R5 mirrorless camera. I chose this camera for the fast frame rate and the high resolution images. Normally I always shoot to both card slots, but since the CFExpress cards are so much faster than SD cards (and I knew I was going to be shooting a lot of burst images), I chose to remove the SD card and only shoot to the faster card. This meant that my buffer would clear fast and I could shoot endlessly without having to wait for the camera to catch up.

In 2018 I used the Canon 100-400mm lens and this time I used the Canon RF100-500mm lens to have a little more reach.

It was a VERY rare day in San Francisco with temperatures in the 90s. That never happens in my home town! I placed myself in a position hoping to get good photos of the planes in front of the Golden Gate Bridge and also over Alcatraz. As photographers, our job is to tell a story, and the story here was that the Blue Angels were flying over San Francisco. There is no better of telling that story, than showing them over these iconic spots. This is one of my first photos, with one of the planes flying in front of the bridge, and clearly showing the heat coming off the back of the engines.

This is one of my favorite photos, with four of the planes in front of the bridge with the trailing smoke streams.

I found that the subject tracking of the Canon R5 was awesome for grabbing these planes in focus. I set the ISO to 400 which gave me a shutter speed of more than 1/4000 sec for most of the photos. I figured that I would need a very fast shutter speed due to the speed of the planes going by.

I tried my best to get tight shots of the Blue Angels, but also wide shots like this one (which I cropped to look like a panoramic image).

I also did my best to capture them from all angles.

I saw this plane coming in just above the north tower of the bridge (from my perspective) and zoomed in tight to get a photo.

With the 45 megapixels of the Canon R5, I can zoom in and see so much detail!

This is the same image cropped even tighter. You can read the name of the pilot on the side of the jet.

The reason I like shooting with a zoom lens like the Canon RF100-500mm lens is that I have the range to shoot in tight, but also pull back and shoot wide like this.

Even though I have the larger Canon 200-400mm lens with a built-in teleconverter, that lens is too large to handhold in a high position like this. I find the Canon RF100-500mm lens easy to handhold for long periods of time.

I love capturing the Blue Angels when they present cool repetitive patterns in flight.

It took me a while to get a photo of one of the planes over Alcatraz, but I wanted something better.

I spent a lot of time turning the camera from horizontal to portrait position.

I love the trail of smoke behind this plane, showing the angle of attack he took as he banked over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Once again, I got the planes flying over Alcatraz, but there was a lot of smoke in the air, so the shot was not as clean as I was hoping for. The quest continued...

Thy flew almost directly above us, giving a great view of the bellies of the Navy jets.

As I watched them split off, I quickly zoomed the lens back from 500mm to 200mm to capture the patterns in the air.

I never really got a super clear shot of the Blue Angels over Alcatraz, but really liked this shot of them forming a great pattern over the old prison.

As the show ended, all six of the Blue Angels made one last pass along the San Francisco Bay and in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. A chance for a nice shot of these magnificent pilots and machines in front of an iconic location.

They made one last low pass in front of the crowds before heading off into the distance.

I was really glad that I used the Canon R5 to capture these images. Even though my Canon R3 has a faster frame rate, the increased resolution of the Canon R5 lets me zoom in and see so much detail. Here is a tighter crop of the same images. You can clearly see each pilot and how they are carefully judging their distance from the planes at their sides.

I hope you enjoyed seeing these images as much as I did capturing them.

Two days after this show, I lead my first photo tour of San Francisco and we had an awesome trip. I will blog those images soon. It went so well that I have just added another SF photo tour for 2024. If you would like to join me next year, you can get more information on my photo tour page.

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Monday, October 2, 2023

Up close and personal in Costa Rica

I will be heading back to the rain forest of Costa Rica late next month. That photo tour is sold out, but I have new tours scheduled for 2024 if you would like to sign up. In today's blog post, I am sharing with you some of the close up photos from the last trip. Some were taken with the Canon RF100mm macro lens and others were taken using the Canon RF100-500mm lens, which does an amazing job of focusing up close. On this trip, I decided to leave the Canon R3 at home, and took the Canon R5 and Canon R6II bodies.

I love these close up shots, because it shows you detail that one might miss otherwise.

On our "macro day" we had a chance to photograph this helmet lizard. I have photographed this type of lizard before but never seen one with a dark blue eye. To capture this, I zoomed the Canon RF100-500mm lens to 370mm to just get the upper part of the body. When capturing the whole body (head to tail), the blue eye was not as noticeable.

If you have followed my blog for a long time, and seen other images from Costa Rica, you know that I love photographing the red eye tree frogs. Since I have captured thousands of images of these little guys, I now look for interesting positions that they might be in. I really liked the way that this frog was positioned on the plant. Mainly it's foot placement and the way that it is looking out towards me. This photo was taken with the long lens.

This is the same frog photographed with the Canon RF100mm macro lens. When getting this close, you can see much more detail and more vibrant colors.

This frog was just hanging out and not moving much. This allowed all of us to easily capture images from all different directions. Straight on...

...and profile. Which lens do you think I was using to get these photos? If you guessed the macro lens, you would be wrong. 😀

I was testing pre-production units of the new Crucial x9 and Crucial x10 solid state drives (which are my new go-to drives). I wanted to take some "lifestyle photos" of these drives in the rain forest, and decided to have a little fun with one of our little models. I put the drive in front of this dart frog and waited for it to hop on for a ride.

Whenever we take photos of the snakes, we always use the longer zoom lenses. Our handler placed this Eyelash Viper on this mossy log and I encouraged everyone to wait for the tongue to come out and shoot at that moment.

In between photographing the reptiles, I always encourage my guests to look around capture the beautiful foliage. I was photographing this plant when I saw this insect flying into the frame. I quickly changed my focus to my new subject and took this shot.

On one of our free mornings, I decided to walk through the grounds of the resort to see what fun wildlife I could capture. Yeah, I know...some people might wonder why I would keep shooting after almost a week of teaching photography, but the passion runs deep and I love what I do! This young Iguana was hanging out on a branch down by the pier. I leaned over a railing, zoomed the Canon RF100-500mm lens all the way to 500mm to get as close as I could, and grabbed this shot. Because I was so close (maybe 6 feet away) and shooting at 500mm, I was able to get really narrow depth of field, with the focus mainly being on the face of the animal.

Almost anywhere you go in the rain forest, you will be treated to butterflies, and they come in all shapes and colors.

Whenever I take groups to the rain forest, I always include a visit to a local "farm" where they grow and make chocolate. Although this stop is more about the culture and a little less about the photography, there is still plenty to shoot there. Many times we are joined by White face monkeys in this location (which did happen on this trip, but those images will come in another blog post), and we always see cool insects. I saw this fly on top of this flower and loved the shiny green body against the yellow flower pedals. It is a simple photo, but one of my favorites from that day.

We saw this Dragon fly taking a break, and I wanted to zoom in to show the amazing patterns in it's wings. Again, this is something we don't usually see when they are flying around in the distance.

The majority of people who go with me on a photo tour to Costa Rica are excited to capture great images of the monkeys, sloths and birds. This just shows you how much more there is to photograph in this beautiful region. Come join me in 2024!

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• You can now purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/