The 24-120 would be (in my mind only since I’ve not shot with it) a great lens for my growing air to air photography. I learned the hard way that changing lenses while doing an air to air shoot is a sure way to have every particular known to man to soon be on your CCD. At the moment, I use either the 24-70 or 70-200 and in looking at my images, I find a lot of time I’m shooting between 60-110 in focal length (great thing about metadata). So I’m thinking that the 24-120 might, might just be the ticket for me in this shooting situation. The former 24-120 wasn’t a bad lens and with this being a total new element design and what Nikon has been producing that last few years, I’m thinking this lens will easily replace the 24-70. If all this mental hijinx comes true only time will tell.

Now the 84f1.4, oh yeah baby, I want that lens. I would fit in nicely with the 24f1.4 and 50f1.4 and with the addition of the 85f1.4, I would have three fast lenses. But to what end for my photography? While I do take portraits, my particular style is with either wider or longer lenses than 85mm. I have the gorgeous 105VR, a wickedly sharp lens and a great portrait lens yet the number of times I’ve used it like that I can count on my hand. So while I think the 85f1.4 is really sexy and I know in my gut will be incredibly sharp, I simply can’t justify with images the capitol outlay to have it sit on my shelf.

And your own photography, which lens will fit in for you? Answering that question can be a challenge made easier or more difficult by your years behind the lens. Photographers are suckers for new gear no matter how long you’ve been shooting (and manufactures know this!) because we are by nature gear heads. If the opportunity affords it, try before you buy, that always leads to the best results. The one thing I want to warn you against in this day and age are basing your purchase on reviews you read. Look at your images, look at your goals, be honest and figure out what problems you’ve been facing a lot in your photography and then determine what might be the best solution for that problem. In the conversations I’ve had with folks this week, the one answer to solving problems that’s been the most common was not the purchase of a new lens, but time behind the lenses they already own. There is nothing wrong with that answer and like I remind some, spending money not on new gear but on time behind the camera is always a great investment in your photography!

I wrote up a little ditty on a favorite lens and Nikon posted it with some clicks. Check ‘er out!

I’m no where near done blogging images, experiences and lessons from Oshkosh but thought I would take a moment to answer some common and very valid questions with this posting. The questions center around the logistics of making it all work. Well here you can see the repacking process. I made it to KS with all my gear in my usual carry-ons/check-ins but cramming all of this in the back of the Cessna 206 required repacking. Since I would be packing the gear into the Cessna and not some luggage handler, I brought to small, wheeless duffles to repack my stuff into from the large check-in bags I use.

Everything I brought with me including myself/sleeping bag went into the tent. Our tents were literally set up at the plane. Even though it was hot & muggy and we have no rain, the rain fly had to be kept on because of the nighttime dew. When I rolled up the tent to fly back to KS, after rolling it up and putting it in its stuff sack, when I turned it on end, water literally poured out. I took a day in the 100 degree heat of KS to dry the tent out.

My gear flew up to Oshkosh and I carried it around the joint as you see here. This is a Mountainsmith Day Recycle with their backpack harness and cube inside. It carried the: 70-200VR2, 24-70AFS, 18AF, 16Fish & 24f1.4 AFS as well as iPad and some misc little stuff. The 200-400VR2 with D3x attached went on my shoulder. The system worked great and permitted tons of flexibility. I did take the D3s with me and carried it around the site the first day but it was obvious to me that shooting video just didn’t work into my plans so it was left at camp the rest of the week. The notebook and other support “stuff” was also left at camp. The iPad has become a very important work tool for me and I have found it nearly replaces the notebook. The one place the notebook still excels is dealing with uploading, filing and backing up images.

The camp is a great place! The folks who are camping alongside of you are really nice people. At the end of the day, the first thing I would do when I got back to camp is upload all cards into the Epson P7000. Then I would go to the charging station they have built for the plane campers. They really have thought things through at Oshkosh to make it a very enjoyable experience! There the iPhone, iPad and notebook would be plugged into charge and while I was showering; the cards would be uploaded to the notebook at this time. Yeah, the place is that safe, never worried about anyone messing with my stuff. With that all done, it was back to the tent to file and blog. It was really quite easy to make it all work and that just made the whole time a ton of fun!

I figured I would have a couple of emails asking that (and I did) so I already had this post in the que. This will have to be a two part answer, a post now for the 1st leg and a post in a week for the 2nd leg. The 1st let I’m going to a brand new event for me, never been to the AirVenture. While the “subject” is planes, that’s really saying a mouth full. Planes comes in every shape, size, age and price tag you can’t imagine, and then some. Add to that the thousands upon thousands of folks and you get a better idea of the subject, it’s large than just planes. This is what I’ll have to photographically deal with what I want for telling the story of this adventure.

The planes come one of two ways, either on the ground or in the air. Statics (parked on the ground) has never been my forte, I struggle with them. So they are something I’m going to push myself on this trip. The primary lenses for statics will be the 18AF, 24-70AFS and 70-200VR2. I will also have the 16Fish just in case an opportunity arises for the ultrawide look. There is the slim chance I might be up in a plane doing some air2air work. For that the 24-70 & 70-200 are essential. Along with the statics are at times folks dressed in period aviator clothes, that means models. So I’ll have a SB-900, SC-27, gels and diffuser along. There are also some aircraft in hangers, long line ups of ships, possible needs for minimum DOF so the 24f1.4 is also in the mix.

That’s all that’s going for the ground work. For photographing the planes in the air, the 200-400VR2. That’s the easiest thing to take for this whole trip. When it comes to bodies I’ll be taking two, the D3x (main body) and D3s which is primarily for video capture.

Along with this, the Mountainsmith Day sling bag will also have the iPad (with model releases & portfolio), business cards, Leatherman Tool, spare D3 battery, 6 16GB 600x Lexar cards, Epson P7000, rain shell and couple other little things. This. along with the 200-400VR2 w/D3x attached will be over my shoulder. And this whole set up I have preflighted at another aviation show and that’s all the camera gear I’ll have on this trip.

Yeap, I do travel a bit. Approximately six months out of the year I’m on the road shooting. Doing that for a long time, this packing thing is pretty much 2nd nature, doesn’t take a ton of thought. The exception is when I’m going on a specific project with specific goals under very specific conditions. What you’re seeing here is the gear that was packed for a two float trip in AK a couple of years back on the Kongakut River. As I pack to hit the road for a month on two different trips, I thought I would explain how I go about it in the thought it might give you some ideas.

When taking off on long projects, I make a written list, starting to write things down a month or more prior to leaving. Things I should have keep popping in my head so I keep writing them down. A couple of weeks out I go through the list and anything new that’s been acquired for the trip is tried out and tested. This gives me time to acquire new if the tests fail. A week out, everything on the list is gathered and laid out. Two days prior to departure everything is packed and weighed. Having done this so many times, items that I know I will need that I know won’t go in the check-in if FedExed to the location.

My trip in 10 days to AK I know I’ll be camping the whole time, working out of vehicles and planes so weight and electricity are a concern. More testing is done with this comes into the equation. Batteries, how many are needed and how to recharge them consumes time because in this day and age, you just can’t be without power and work. All of this has to go through the thought process.

Are there any tricks? Yeah, there are! The main one is to think through and write down what your photographic goals are for the project long before you buy airline tickets. With those goals written down, look at them, think them through and ask yourself, “What possible problems might I face photographically to reach these goals and who do I solver them?” You can never guess at them all, but the more you think about it, the better prepared you’ll be. Just simple things like your tent can make or break your success. If you’re going somewhere for example where you know it’s going to rain alot, is you tent big enough to house you, your gear, a place to work (ie download images, clean gear) and dry out clothing?

When it comes to gear, you can see what camera gear I generally take listed here. What if you’re new to travel and never gone on a project, where do you start? Well, while you’re reading this, I’m on a plane to WI for the big AirVenture and will be camping with a couple other guys out of a Cessna 210. I’ll the be there to talk with friends and clients, photograph planes and R&R. This is all new to me so once I knew I was going I started to make preparations. For example, the Cessna 210 can only take so much weight and only has so much space so going over everything I was taking and weighing it was really important. Tent, sleeping bag, ground pad are all bulky items. Next, I was working as a digital photographer, how would I recharge batteries and work? Lastly, how would I get myself and my gear around this giant place in 95degree heat and work? To answer the last question, I went to a place that was that hot, took the gear I thought I would use in WI and walked it around for four hours. I learned that while the gear I had did the job, the sling bag I owned didn’t worked so I bought a new one and then tested it out to make sure.

The airlines have pretty much taken and romance out of travel so it’s up to us to think things through, take what is needed to get the job done and be comfortable and safely pack it so once we’re on location, we’re good to go. Hopefully the little of my process I’ve written here and what’s available on the link will help you make the most of your travels

Here’s the same plane, a P-51D and it’s going the same speed and the shutter speed is still 1/90 yet it looks like it’s standing still. Does background make any difference?

OK, we’re looking down on the subject now, no sky in the photo and it doesn’t really help. Now the mind knows that planes fly and since we see the earth way in the background, we know the plane is flying. But the photo is not saying, “FAST!”

Change the angle of the Mustang, use a cleaner background and throw in some clouds and still, no speed. Why? The camera is not panning with the subject! Flying air to air, the camera is keeping pace with the subject not by the camera moving but by the camera platform moving. The camera, subject and background are all going the same speed. It’s really no difference then photographing a rock. And here lies the problem, I want that “speed” or movement in my still images when I’m shooting air to air. I’ve written about this problem before and as you can see, I’m still looking for “the” solution.

What’s the problem? We need a blurred background to communicate movement, something not being captured when the camera is moving in relationship with the subject AND the background. I have found an in camera solution to this problem and I’m saving my pennies to do it because it will cost money. So while I’m saving my pennies I wanted to see if there was something that was in the budget that would solve the problem in the short term.

The folks at OnOne Software make some really cool products and in my search I was in touch with them and they turned me on to FocalPoint2 . FocalPoint2 is a pretty sophisticated software that basically gives you an f/1.4 appearance to a photograph taken at f/32. That’s really selling the pluggin short because it does a lot more, but you get the basic concept. Since my problem is the background is too sharp to communicate speed, I thought I would give this a try. As you can see, it does look like I shot at f/1.4 but I don’t have the feel of speed, not even close. Why not?

When you pan, the background gets blurred but more than that is happening. Anything in the background just doesn’t go out of focus, but “streaks.” Those streaks give the eye a since of direction and really mimics what you see in comics when they draw something moving. You see streaks coming from behind the moving object indicating movement and speed. So while FocalPoint2 does a killer job accurately creating an out of focus background, it doesn’t streak it. You might be saying something like, “Hey Moose, use Motion Blur in Photoshop!” It doesn’t work either, I spent an hour trying. So, the bottomline is, keep saving the pennies, in camera is the solution.

As a side note, all off OnOne pluggins run 64bit! That’s cool!

Panningis an essential technique we use to freeze a moving subject. By the camera staying in one place and keeping pace with the subject, we null any movement of the subject so even at slow shutter speeds we can get a sharp subject though the camera and subject are moving. The reason is real simple, the subject and film plane are in sync. So when you do it right, you get a photo like this. A tack sharp image of a P-51D going 451mph.

With panning, while the camera and subject are keeping pace with each other, the background on the other hand is not. Since the camera is moving with the subject and the background is not moving, the background gets blurred. How much blur? That all depends on the shutter speed, the slower the speed the more blurred the background.

Ever watch the movie The Aviator about Howard Hughes? Well there’s a great scene where Hughes while watching dailies of his Hell’s Angles movie, watching planes flying against a bald sky screams the planes look like they are holding still. His solution, clouds! Clouds make a world of difference! As you can see here, the camera is stationery on the ground panning with the P-51D as it rips by. With no clouds in the background, the planes looks like it’s pretty much standing still. Put clouds in the background, even though they are a long ways in the distance, shooting at 1/90 the panning action blurs the clouds enough to give the illusion of movement.

Why do I bring this all up? Being a visual communicator and an old fart, I’m always looking for ways to tell the story better and at the same time, finding those answers in camera. Yeah, I know my way around the digital darkroom but finding an in camera solution is what I always strive for. You ask, “What’s the problem here?” Come back in a minute and I’ll show ya.

Photos captured by D3/D3x, 200-400VR on Lexar UDMA digital film

Yeap, basically everyday when I’m home and not shooting, Rocky here is my exercise partner (a Douglas Tree Squirrel). I’m still amazed how many folks really wonder and ask me, “Do you really handhold those big lenses?” Not only do I really do that, but here’s an example of doing it and getting a sharp image at 1/30 f8. It doesn’t come by accident, VR technology isn’t getting the sharp image (because I’m not moving, it ain’t active) but good old fashion proper handholding technique and lots of practice.

No I’m not out to make gallery images when I exercise, just simply get proper handholding a second nature response. In this case, I got so close to Rocky that I had to manually focus because I was inside the realm of the 200-400VR2′s AF MFD. At the same time, Rocky like usual is eating. When small mammals and birds eat seed, their lower jaw/mandible which is controlled by a muscle connected up by the ear can cause the eye to not be sharp. So when shooting at 1/30 (1/125 or higher is required to freeze this action) I work on not only my handholding but also peak of action to freeze the eye. It sounds really silly, but it’s what I do because bottomline, image quality is everything and it starts with a sharp image. (And no, not every image will be tack sharp even with practice)

Photo captured by D3x, 200-400VR2 on Lexar UDMA digital film

The principle lens I used at PRS was the 200-400VR2. It did a great job, I’m lovin what I’m seeing in my images. Here’s a quick example, focused on the pilot, Bruce, as he heads around the pylon. The shutter speed for this handheld image was 1/180. Schweet!

The principle lens I used at PRS was the 200-400VR2. It did a great job, I’m lovin what I’m seeing in my images. Here’s a quick example, focused on the pilot, Bruce, as he heads around the pylon. The shutter speed for this handheld image was 1/180. Schweet!