Shutter speed is your biggest factor in situations like this-- your plane is moving up and down, the subject plane is moving too. And in this case, it is moving past the background quickly as well. A slower shutter speed here would have made the water blur better. But, I might have lost the shot to bumping around. From an average air-to-air mission, I come back with 400 or more images. In this case, it was about 600, with another 200 images shot on the ground. You will want a large memory card that is fast. My D3 has a dual system and I shoot with 16 gigs total but 8 gigs is usually enough.