Another Reason to be at Reno
Too Cool!!
Marvelous Morning…
We’ve been at the Reno Air Races for a few days now but today was our first sunrise shoot. We were very fortunate to have the Spitfire mk14 from the So Cal CAF Wing for a subject! Wow! Now how we got it out on the flight line seems to becoming local legend already!
yesterday, Team Peterson (Jake, Brent and myself) as we’re being called this week went up to the folks to talk some business. We had talked amongst ourselves how we’d like to photograph the Spit, but Jake made the move and made it happen. That’s not the legend. The Spit can’t be pulled out with conventional tow bar so they said we’d have to push it out in the morning. No big deal, done that before.
Come oh dark thirty there we were with the great folks from CAF pushing out the Spit. Normally aircraft are towed out but when the rest of the photogs came out, they just saw Team Peterson deciding they wanted the plane to photograph so just went into the pits and grabbed it. Of course once we got it out of the pits and the sun was starting to glow on the horizon, they saw the CAF Crew and realized what was going on. But the ramp rumor had already started and the jokes began to fly. It was simply a marvelour morning!
As for the photography itself, it’s pretty straight forward. Shooting with the D800/MD with 24-70AFS on a Really Right Stuff Ground Pod, the only thing unique was my wearing new pads. These are all single shots processed nearly 100% in ACR using the Shadow Slider and Split Grad to do the heavy lifting. Simple clicks really.
Hovering at 1/20
This Cobra is just freaking cool! It was flying in to the Heritage at the Reno Air Races, hovering in is a better way to phrase it. It “taxied” in down the ramp to the parking area so I just panned with it and blasted. With the Lexar 64GB 1000x giving me a huge buffer (100+) in the D4 and shooting with the 200-400AFS with TC-14e on Auto AF at 1/20, I was able to blur the main rotar. That is a challenge with those big, slow rotating blades. The back rotar is simple but the direction of rotation and size of the top one just makes blurring a bitch. The slow shutter speed of 1/20 just starts to get a decent blur. You might be wondering about handholding and panning at 1/20. You can do that, just takes practice, practice, practice which is why in part we’re at the air races early. Getting the mind, muscle and skills set polished for the rest of the week is essential in capturing those key moments. Speed at the camera controls makes forgetting the technical and concentrating on the subject possible.
Reno Air Races Baby!!!!
Well, we went from the high of Photoshop World to the high of the Reno Air Races, talk about being fortunate! After taking are of some very important tasks, we arrived to our trailer and friends and good times Monday night. Tuesday we woke to a gorgeous day and the sound of aircraft reving engines…it was heaven! We spent the morning clearing our heads, getting into the flow of things and saying hello to friends. Some of those friends are aircraft and this is one of them. Furious is sporting new scheme designed by our dear friend Bucky.
This amazing Hawker Sea Fury has an illustrious racing career so it was great to see it back in the air. You often don’t think of the underbelly of an aircraft worth photographing but this one most definitely is! Here it is making the bank and coming down towards Home Pylon. Shot with the D4, 200-400AFS on Auto AF, it’s really easily just to pan, shoot and enjoy. The best part though is on either side of me are our boys Brent & Jake and around them all our aviation photog friends. Life is good….
Gone West – Bob
