High speed shutter

[Oly_shooter]

Today, a pair of F16 fighters are touring the State of South Carolina doing flyovers of our hospitals to honor our health care workers. I got to a good vantage point and setup my EM5 II as follows: 12-100 pro lens with circular polarizer filter, single point auto focus, shutter priority sequential high speed, 1/4000 sec, f4.0, iso auto (shot at 1250),zoom length 55mm. I had plenty of time as I saw the planes coming almost straight at me and I had an excellent view. Since they are closing very quickly, you get one chance so I waited till they were very close. I got the perfect composition and pulled the trigger and silence. The shutter didn’t fire. I figure the autofocus was trying to find something to focus on. I released and fired again, and this time the high speed shutter did its thing. I was very disappointed in how this turned out. I thought about going in with manual focus set to infinity. Would this have worked better? I did several test shots of traffic in the parking lot ahead of time and got good results.

[Rob Trek]

I think MagRat can give you better advice since he does this kind of photography professionally and uses and E-M5 Mark II.

All I can add here is that using a polarizer kills 1 or 2 stops of light reaching the sensor and can slow AF down. You didn't mention your AF settings, but I would have tried 9 point C-AF with C-AF Release "OFF" and shoot in Continuous L shutter.

Hope that helps.