The aeronautical kind, not the geographical kind. A T-6 “Texan” at the 2011 Rocky Mountain Air Show:
Shot with my Olympus E-5 and Sigma “Bigma” 50-500 lens at 420mm (equivalent to 840mm on a full-frame camera). I know there’s a second seat in back, but the cockpit still looks a bit cozy to me…
There are times in life when you have to remember to stop and smell the roses. Or in this case, to pay attention to what your kid’s fixated on.
We were at the foot of Mount Rushmore, being fully impressed by the sculpture, when our little one started chatting away about a squirrel eating “a nut.” So after I broke free of my granite-inspired haze, I swapped to a long lens on my camera and zoomed in on the scene:
Turns out it was a chipmunk, and it was eating a grasshopper. A nut would be tastier for us (my girl got disgusted when I told her what the main course really was), but the little guy seemed to be quite pleased with his insect meal…
Seen among the Maya ruins of Dzibanché in Quintana Roo, México:
It was more than a bit odd to run across this flower in the depths of the Yucatan peninsula’s dry season this summer — so when I spotted it, I just had to grab this shot. Bright colors against muted tones, life among long-vacant ruins. Can’t beat the contrasts!
Another Rocky Mountain Air Show shot — this one of a B-2 “Spirit” bomber:
Taken with my Oly E-5 and Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm lens, at 228mm (456mm full-frame equivalent).
Another shot from this year’s Rocky Mountain Air Show:
This bird’s a T-33 trainer, essentially a 2-seat model of the F-80 “Shooting Star,” and sports the Thunderbird paint scheme.
I haven’t shot at an air show in years (since digital), so kind of had to start fresh for this. So I did what I usually do in situations like this — dug around on Flickr to see what focal length people used for the shots I liked the most. So I wound up taking only my Sigma 50-500 “Bigma” to the airshow (along with a monopod to keep my arms from wearing out).
The scheme worked pretty well — the above shot is actually a composite of two made with the lens racked out to 500mm (on my Olympus E-5, so that’s 1000mm full frame equivalent for folks with really big cameras). One original frame had the plane in front of fairly boring (flat) clouds:
The other frame had these interesting clouds with a much smaller / more distant image of the jet.
For those wanting to try something similar, here’s my advise to you:
Don’t bother with a monopod, the jets at an airshow move too fast for one to be anything but a bother (even with a heavy lens).
Yes, the “Bigma” really is slow to focus at 500mm — expect to take more shots than you’d desire, given that some of them will have missed focus. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good air show lens — at least on a cropped-frame camera, 50mm will cover most ground shots, and 500mm will get you some nice distance shots (out where the jets are easier to track).
Bracket exposures if you have clouds anywhere in the sky, otherwise you’ll wind up with a bunch of underexposed airplanes on bright backgrounds.
A T-28 “Trojan” goes through its paces:
This is the first in a series of shots I’ll be showing here from this year’s Rocky Mountain Air Show, up in Broomfield (Colorado).
Seen on Denver’s 16th St. mall…
“Downtown” Tikal, Guatemala — standing on the platform of Temple II, looking east toward Temple I:
This is a 2-shot panorama using a wide-angle lens, so covers just short of a 180-degree field of view.
If you’ve dropped by this blog more than a time or two in the past, you likely know I’m a bit of an archaeology buff. Here’s a shot through my 60mm crystal ball of Chimney Rock, in southern Colorado:
The Chimney Rock Archaeological Area is home to some ancestral puebloan ruins, nearly 1000 years old. They were built at this site due to the two rock pinnacles in this image — every 18.6 years, the moon rises between the columns (the geometry is called a Major Lunar Standstill). If you’d like to see this event in person, there’s good news and bad news. Good news: the site has public viewing events for lunar standstill. Bad news: the next one won’t occur until 2022.
So patience is the key…
When my dad passed away some years back, among other things I inherited an old Polaroid camera. It was buried in the middle of a bunch of boxes, and at the time I couldn’t see much use for it — but didn’t have the heart to give it away. During a recent clean-up, I ran across the thing again and decided I should either use it or chuck it.
Luckily for me, you can still get film for the thing — and clumsy as the camera is to use (manual focus w/o rangefinder, fixed aperture, etc.), it can still take a good picture:
I made this diptych using (expired) Polaroid 100 Sepia Giambarba film from The Impossible Project. Sadly, the IP folks couldn’t save the old plant that made this kind of film — so when they run out of the old (but obviously well-preserved) stock of this stuff, it’s gone for good. But while it lasts, this is fantastic film for anything you’d like to give an antique touch — and as you can see, the (normally disposed of) negative can be art too!
The subject of the image is a Marzocco Lion (at the Museum of Outdoor Art in Englewood, Colorado), a carved replica of an original by Donatello. BTW, the camera is a Super Shooter Plus — you can get one just like it for $5 – $10 on eBay.