I’m writing up another eBook review, so have limited time to blog today — but in the meantime, here’s a shot from this year’s Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta:
Getting airborne
Category Archives: Up in the air
Left bank
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…
Spirit, overhead
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).
Like a shooting star
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:
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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).
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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).
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Bracket exposures if you have clouds anywhere in the sky, otherwise you’ll wind up with a bunch of underexposed airplanes on bright backgrounds.
Trojan aircraft
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).
Nightfall
At full size, this is a (free) iPad wallpaper — but thought I’d put it up here too, just for show:
If you’d like this on your iPad, just click on the image to get to its Flickr page — you can downlink the 1024×1024 wallpaper image from there. FWIW, this is a slightly-stylized version of last night’s sundown, shot with my iPhone.
War bonnet
Another fireworks shot from our July 4th trip down to Cortez:
I don’t know why, but this shot reminds me of a Plains Indian war bonnet — seemed a fitting name, at any rate.
By the way, I’m tinkering around on Google+, and it looks like a promising platform for photographers. If you’d like an invite, drop me a line!
Burst on a wave
I took this shot at a July 4th fireworks display while we were down in the metropolis of Cortez, Colorado visiting a family friend. Of all my “accidental” images, I think it’s the one I like the best.
It’s not a multiple exposure shot, and I’ve done essentially no post processing work. Think you know how it happened? Let me tell you the tale.
Cortez isn’t a particularly large town — population was just under 10,000 at the most recent census. But when we were down there to visit our friend over the Independence Day weekend, we were expecting a good show for July 4th. A new guy in the city government had taken over job of coordinating Cortez’ yearly fireworks display, and we were hoping he’d try to make a “splash” his first time out.
Apparently a lot of the locals had the same expectation — I think the whole town turned out for the show. As a result, the four of us were sandwiched on a blanket on a little strip of grass — right next to the sidewalk that’s right next to the road that’s the line marking the safe viewing area for the display.
So we had great seats, aside from pesky pedestrians occasionally walking by right in front of us.
Now bear in mind that shooting fireworks is somewhat of a hopeful process. The round goes up, you open the shutter, and your camera captures whatever it sees in the next few seconds. Maybe you get something good, maybe you don’t.
In this particular case, I opened the shutter just before one burst went off — I thought it would be a good capture. Then a couple of young guys walked right in front of us with “glow sticks” in their hands. I was a bit annoyed at the time, obviously they’d ruined the image.
Or so I thought until I got home and could see it on my computer’s screen. As “ruined” images go, I think it turned out pretty well…
As if in a dream
Seen somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, on the way back from our recent travels:
We’ve just returned from a 2+ week jaunt through the Yucatan, checking out Maya ruins and lots of interesting cultural attractions. Buckle your seatbelt, I’ll soon be deluging you with travel pictures (and more than a few things I’ve learned about what gear you can / can’t count on while on the road)!
Clear flying
A nice (mostly-)blue sky shot from last October’s Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta:
