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A few air show photos
October 31, 2007Sorry it took so long... but here are a few of my fave. photos from the Sheppard AFB Air Show from Oct. 20th.
I'd have posted them sooner... but I was in Fort Worth all last week for my sister April's wedding (more on that later).
Enjoy...
So, all together, between Friday and Saturday at the air show, I had more than 1,400 photos to go over. Granted, I deleted nearly 900 of them for various reasons (out of focus, not well composed, series of same plane doing same maneuver). I narrowed it down to about 40 shots for the web gallery slideshow.... but here are the 5 best if you ask me.
This is by far and away my fave. picture from the entire day. The Air Force "Heritage Flight" with an F-22 Raptor, P-47 Thunderbolt and the A-10 Thunderbolt II (or as I used to call it... the Warthog).
This was the finale of the entire day and just couldn't be more perfect if it tried in my opinion. The sunlight was perfect on the planes, their formation was good, and it pretty much gave me chills to see it in real life. I've seen several heritage flight passes before... but this was the very first with the F-22 that I've witnessed.
Second fave.... actually from Friday. This was the trip up in the C-130 with the SOCOM jump team. I managed to rig up a remote control camera (although I forgot to take pictures of the rig) with the supervision of the pilot. He asked me "Is that thing going to work?" To which I replied (thinking he meant the photos) "I hope so."
He was asking if the entire rig would stay put and not fall out of the back of the plane an to the ground.... 10,000 ft. below.
The setup was no different than your standard backboard remote camera for a basketball game (which I'd love to try this season at MSU)
Getting the settings right were easy, manual focus to a point where I thought they'd be, guess the settings for the exposure in my head. The rest of it is pretty much luck. I can't control how they jump or if I'll be able to see several of them at once. It's out of my hands. Turns out... I got pretty lucky.
This one was of the divers on Saturday. Several seconds after they jumped out of the back of the C-130, the plane banked sharply and just so happened to fly in the path of where I was shooting. Just one of those lucky type of shots. Just happened to have it framed well in the viewfinder, and got off maybe 3 shots before the plane was gone.
Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
This is a cool shot.... I've never seen the water vapor trails on the wings of an F-117. I'm sure it's happened before, but I've never actually seen it or seen a photograph of it until now. I had no idea I had that shot until I got back to the office and went through them.
Planes doing stunts are a dime a dozen.... you have to get something really awesome to impress anybody that's seen them a lot. I like this shot mainly because of the visual lines that make it look like these planes are literally right on top of each other. It's an optical illusion, they were flying side-by-side... but the effect is still pretty cool.
You can see the rest of the air show photos online at the gallery page at our website. Enjoy...
Posted by Jason Palmer at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
