D50

Location : west lothian (scotland)

hi chaps i'm looking for some help with taking pics of aircraft have had the D50 well over a year now and have been messing around with the settings to get prop blur etc

while at RIAT i was struggling to get decent results
i use at 75-300 nikon lens
i had it on P setting and down to 200 ISO still with no prop blur so i changed to S with the same ISO and same result
i tried A and found i was getting some sort of result 800-1600 ISO if i went any lower than that
it was taking pics out of focus

can some one point me in the right direction

Location : Glasgow

not a Nikon user but it should translate across pretty much all brands.

Don't use P unless it also gives you the option of adjusting the shutter speed (in Minolta speak this would be Ps program shift) to what you want.
For prop blur you basically want to get the shutter speed as low as you can whilst not running into blurry shots from camera shake.
I usually aim for 1/160 but anywhere upto 1/250 should be OK.

Part of getting the shutter speed down is also to select the right ISO for the conditions - in bright conditions I would suggest no more than ISO200.

So:
set ISO
set required shutter speed
either let camera set aperture by setting shutter priority or go full manual & meter & set aperture yourself.

Location : Gloucester Spotter Watch Member : no

I agree, Set the camera to S and set the shutter speed yourself and let the camera figure out the aperture. Set the ISO to 100 to start (this is the D50's base ISO) and if you see a LO flashing in the viewfinder, up the iso until the camera can find an aperture to use. With that lens, I would think the max aperture is 5.6 or somewere around that, so on a cloudy day you may need to up the ISO to 400 or more to get the fast shutter speed. Be careful with the D50 though, above ISO800 it starts to get quite noisy.