The Cleveland Photo Society buys box seats in the front row of the Cleveland Air Show every year, and I go with my Sister-in-law Jackie to try my hand at air show photography.
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This year's gear and notes
I've got a new Sony photo rig for the airshow (yes, again). I'm trying out the Sony A7R vi, to see if its stacked sensor is fast enough to avoid rolling shutter with planes (and make my A1 ii obsolete). (It is fast enough - I didn't see any rolling shutter). The 30fps frame rate of the A7R vi was great, but the larger files meant I had to be careful not to overrun the camera's buffer and get stuck with "SLOW" mode. I used pre-capture, especially with the crossing jets, to try to get the decisive moment, so that buffer was already filling up before I hit the shutter button. I also shot a Sony 100-400 f/4.5 with 1.4x TC - last year's 300mm prime was too limiting; I felt like I was missing shots because I couldn't zoom out.
That combination gave me some fantastic shots - and a lot of throwaways; 30fps is a lot of pictures to cull through. (I took about 1.4 TB - yes, terabytes - of pictures.) That said, even with the buffer filling up, even with the large amount of space - the 67MP files from the A7R vi made it worth the hassle - I had plenty of pixels to work with when I had to crop into an image.
One problem this year was heat haze, which I don't remember in the past. Pictures farther out were soft - pictures that were fine in earlier years - so I had to adjust my expectations for how far away I could shoot and still get good pictures.
panning with prop planes
Speaking of culling - I tried to do panning shots this year, shooting at 1/250 to get propellor blur on the prop planes. It was frustrating how few shots were in focus, but that's the point of that method - most of them won't be in focus, but the ones that are have the needed propellor blur for the plane to look right. I'm going to have to keep practicing my panning. (I keep forgetting to rotate my whole torso at the waist, holding my arms steady as I pan - I keep trying to follow the planes with my arms, which leads to all sorts of wobbly shots.) If you want to try this, go for 1/320 or slower - the experts say 1/250 is a good starting point - and when you're comfortable, slow your shutter down even more. 1/125 is great, 1/100 is better, and 1/80 is possible. (Or so they say - I never got to where I thought 1/250 was truly comfortable, because my panning was all over the place. Maybe next year.)
PS: If you enjoy these pictures, check out my How to Shoot Air Show Photos post.
Photo Gallery from Cleveland Air Show 2026
Thanks for reading!
I hope you enjoyed the pictures - if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.
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