A Historic Flight

Video is a part of most of my shooting the past couple of years. Usually I mumble at it because I find it a pain in the arse when it comes to editing. But there are times when I am so glad I’ve taken the time to become somewhat familiar with it. This is just one such occasion. The Moose Cam was running as we experienced this piece of aviation history. The video tells just part of the story. The rest will appear in three articles I have coming out. There is that much when it comes to the people and the aircraft making this day happen. The only piece of trivia is the little white plane on the left you see as the Super Corsair taxis out is the A36 Bonanza where we sitting, waiting our turn to taxi out to run up area.

When it comes to creation of the video, I’m using now the Coolpix S9100 because it shoots 1080p but has no way of connecting a mic. It rides in the hotshoe of the D3x via a miniball head. I hope you enjoy!

In the Bag
D3x with
70-200VR2 and
TC-17e II
D3s with
24-70AFS all loaded with
Lexar 32GB 600x cards
Coolpix S9100 Moose Cam attached to
Manfrotto 494 Mini Ball

Ghost of Cleland & Becker

These to amazing aircraft, Race #57 (F2G-1D Super Corsair) and Race #74 (F2G-2 Super Corsair) haven’t flown together since the Thompson since 1949! For a very special moment in time, yesterday, they flew together again over the desert of AZ. I was incredibly fortunate to be asked to come down and be part of this aviation history. The day start long before the sun rose and finished long after it set. I spent the whole day with my good friends the Odegaards, Robert & Casey, never stopping for lunch, just doing planes and photography basically 16hrs. The story of the day will appear in Flight Journal in the near future. It’s a helluva story and I very incredibly honored to be asked by Robert to be a very small part of it!

In the Bag
D3s
70-200VR2
A36 Bonanza – Doesn’t quite fit in the bag

You’re One Crazed Photographer!

I received more then one email this last week with this sentiment. It comes from video I had playing as folks walked into my presentations this past week at B&H, Unique Photo and Foto Care. It’s the video you can see below of our air to air shoot with the F2G-2 Super Corsair. While I was talking wildlife photography, I can’t help but sneak in a little aviation photography anymore and the response has been, well, simply amazing! When you have 150 folks waiting in line to ask questions, answering questions really thoroughly is a little bit of a challenge. I also had a number of emails about this shoot so thought I’d post all the answers to all the questions I can.

This was a still photography editorial shoot. The photography platform is a A36 Bonanza, the subject is a F2G-2 Super Corsair. The principle camera rig is the D3x with 70-200VR2 w/TC-17e attached. Secondary is the D3s with 24-70AFS. When the buffer of the D3x is full, I switch over to the D3s, otherwise the D3x does all the work. Attached into the hot shoe of the D3x hotshoe is a Coolpix S9100 shooting 1080vid. In the cockpit of the Super Corsair is a GoPro shooting video of its cockpit and me hanging out the photo platform.

Shooting the video you see above is Sharon, she’s in the second seat in the A36 cabin. She’s shooting with the D7000 with a 16-18AFS lens. Attached in its hotshoe is the Sennheiser G3 with the mic tucked up in the earpiece of my David/Clark headset to record the audio. Now you might be wondering what am I going to do with all this video because we shot a lot. Well, we have a lot of behind the scenes video sitting in the can and I’ve just now hired an editor to put all the pieces together so we can share it with you. I started 2011 thinking I could tackle that along with everything else I do and, well, I simply don’t have the time or skills. So, it’s one of those winter projects we’ll slowly get finished and posted. I hope this answers folks questions on the story behind the video

You are so lucky you have a video to look at because if you had to survive on just my drawings, you’d never learn a thing! But I hope this answers folk’s questions. You sure were great and I really look forward to seeing you on the flight line!

In the Bag
D3x
D3S
70-200VR2
24-70AFS
TC-17E
Lexar 32GB 600 UDMA
Coolpix S9100 w/Manfrotto Ball Head
D7000
16-85AFS
Sennheiser G3 w/Fuzzy Windjammer
GoPro