I’ve just gone through the last 11 months in my diary and realised that I have boarded a plane more than 75 (75!) times during that period…
To me it is clear that I would not have done that had I not have a weakness for planes.
i grew up in an air base, where jet fighters used to be scrambled at first light every morning. Imagine two F-4s taking off at full whack with after-burners ON…the sound of the J79 engines, the smell of heavy fuel burning and the view of those magnificent birds tearing up the sky!!!!
As you’ve already learned (especially if you follow me on Facebook), my work involves with quite a bit of travel to all sorts of places, mostly cities but sometimes it is a matter of hiring a car and doing a bit of driving, or moving between cities and towns using public transport.
Some of the low-cost airlines in Europe, due to the still-suffering economy, have increased their use of small turbo-prop aircraft, usually a twin-engine, 60-80 seater, which I find much more fun than those White & Orange (guess which airline) A319s and A320s…partly because you can actually smell the jet fuel burning while inside the cabin.
The overall flight time, even though they do not fly so fast, is not increased since take off and landing are much quicker and they don’t have to reach 34,000ft for cruising…
Anyway…I recently had a great opportunity to mix work and pleasure when I visited the Farnborough 2010 Air Show
The first day was a trade day and as the place was so big, I spent a lot of time running between the halls and the many stands I wanted to see and the meeting I had scheduled. I did have a big camera with me (a Leaf Aptus-II 10/ Phase One 645DF combo) but other than a few sample images for demonstration I did not get much chance to shoot anything interesting:-(
So this gave me a good enough excuse to drag the family over to the show on the weekend. On top of the educational part (thst’s the one where daddy explains to wife & kids about the airplanes and their history etc.) I had an opportunity to shoot a few frames of old WWI/ WWII planes doing their air display and also a few static frames of the more modern planes on the ground.
This time around, I only had a “lowly” DSLR with a zoom lens, which did a fantastic job, although I kind-of wish I had a bit more megapixles to work with:-)
I’ll let you be the judges and I hope you enjoy them…click on an image to enlarge it.
These photos are available for purchase as downloads and can print nicely at A4 (8″X11″) size. please contact me for pricing and availability (info at yaypro dot com)
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