It is single digit cold outside today, no trip to the park for me. Michigan gray sky. No birds flying around the house, so guessing the same at the park. Trying to get warm with a little trip down memory lane to the 2019 MCAS Beaufort Air Show.
Looking forward to the 2021 show in a few weeks. Being in South Carolina, it is one of the early shows on the circuit. Michigan needs to get its vaccination program in gear!
The day we were out at the show was prefect weather-wise. I seem to remember some rookie sunburn mistakes were made, but that is another story. We were able to get some good seats in the bleachers, which contributed to the sunburn. No cover. This year we have pavilion seats. Covered and socially distanced. But, back to 2019. Love the military airshows. Pure air power. Noise. Heat.
This air show I was really concentrating on shutter speeds. With the shots posted today, shutter speed didn't matter much. Jets. But I was constantly adjusting speed depending on jet or prop or rotor driven aircraft was the subject. Game within a game. The camera lens combo for the air shots is the D500 and 70-300. For the most of the shots that was plenty of lens as we were very close to show center. Except for one shot at the end of the runway. And we'll get to that later.
When looking at this shot, I'm recalling the following. For a 1.3 DX shot, that is about as clean an image as I can get. The trick is that the subject did fill the frame, there is very little cropping involved. It usually doesn't work out that well for me. Also that day, one environmental factor that showed up in most shots were the heat waves. A number of my ground shots show this phenomenon at some point in the shot (Yes, if you had the word phenomenon on your blog bingo card, you can finally mark it off.) Most of the air shots did not suffer from this. We shoot, we learn.
And speaking of learning, I was experimenting with spot metering on some shots. And what I learned from the day was - stop experimenting with spot metering. I won't make that mistake again. Also looking back at the shots, the EV is almost always -1. The sunshine would often create hot spots on airframes with a more shiny paint coat. The -1 setting usually did the trick of better exposure.
This is the older model Hornet, which is pretty much phased out of the inventory now. That didn't keep it from putting on a great show. I think everyone tries to get that exact moment of touchdown with the smoke from the tires. And really looking forward to the Blue Angels show this year with the Super Hornets now that the SH is the team aircraft. Back to 2019. This was shot at the end of the runway. All sorts of distortion due to the heat waves at that distance. And this too was a 1.3 DX shot. And because this was so far away - this required a pretty good crop. Had to go into my bag of tricks and super software to get this to come out.
When I see military aircraft from a head on profile, I think that air opponents who see this are not going to have a good day. I first thought about that line when I saw an A-10 at a static display. The F-35 may be missing the cannon, but can still deliver a punch. This profile illustrates the benefit of being as close to show center as possible.
This is a creeper shot to me. It creeps up on me. The more I see it the more I like it. If I was going to put this in a contest or something, I'd remove the light posts on the right side of the frame. Just a bit on the distracting side. Other than that - think about this. I was standing on the top row of the bleacher seats. The bleaches had maybe ten rows. And you can see the top of the wing. Eye level. Awesome.
The day was fun. Looking to getting there this year. Especially when I look outside now and see snow.
No comments:
Post a Comment