Anthony’s Favourites 2014:part 1

Probably my favourite picture of the year: two Lancasters, British and Canadian, with their escorts approach Beachy Head at low level

I’m going to divide this year’s favourites into two parts:

1 will be aircraft

2 will be general photography

This year has seen a coincidence of several anniversaries with aviation links, as well as some new or visiting aircraft that I’ve not seen before. 2014 has seen the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, the 70^th Anniversary of D-Day, as well as the 50^th Anniversary of the Red Arrows. Not only that, but we’ve had a tour from the Canadian Heritage Museum Lancaster (giving us two in the air at once with the BBMF Lanc), as well as other significant aircraft such as a pair of Polish Fitters. There’s been a seeming rush of new replicas around too, such as a Travelair Mystery Ship, a Mew Gull and two BE2c aircraft.

The pictures here are all reasonably large files (1400px or 2000px on their longest side), so worth clicking on to view large.

I’m a big believer that with blog posts, in general, less is more, but, really, I find it hard to edit this selection down much further. So, there’s about 26 pictures – ten or so more than I’d originally meant to assemble. I’ve also not tried to duplicate too many aircraft types, but sometimes it just can't be helped :-)

On with the show!

To start with D Day commemorations at Duxford, end of May.

The D-Day anniversary brought out large numbers of aircraft with connections to the invasion. Multiple Dakotas (C47) appeared at various events, including these on the flight line at Duxford in May. That day, they commemorated the parachute jumps onto the continent, including this demonstration from the Parachute Regiment.  Duxford would be much diminished without Spitfires, so here is MH434 still low after take-off. Finally, the Duxford-based Wildcat made a very welcome return.

The return of Biggin Hill

I was delighted at the return of an air display at Biggin Hill for the first time in a few years. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't great, so I got few pictures that could stand out. But the Typhoon display with plenty of jelly air was great.

RIAT in July: really too many pictures, but what can you do?

 50th Anniversary fly past by the Red Arrows with representatives of 4 other team: the Breitling jets, the Patrouille de France, Patrouille Suisse and Frecce Tricolori.

 Spiral descent: Solo Turk F-16

 Polish Fitters

 Frecce Tricolori singleton

 US Navy FA-18

 Swedish Gripen turning in the rain on the Sunday morning

 Making its on clouds: A400M

 The Italian Airforce Tornado display was one of the best I've ever see from this type

 

I'd not seen the A-11 AMX before: this is an Italian aircraft

 The Textron AirLand E530 Scorpion N531TA was also new to me

 ... as was this P-8 Poseidon

And now - as they say - for something completely different: Headcorn

 I made several trips to Headcorn as usual, to hang out on the fence with Graham, Colin and Len: it is amazing the variety of types that come through. As an example, here is an Auster AOP6 WJ368.

In commemorating the outbreak of the First World War, there had been an attempt to re-create the first flights of the aircraft of the BEF to France. The weather was bad enough that it never happened as planned, but one of the BE2c aircraft made it to Headcorn. This record shot of it is a stitch of 4 overlapping pictures at 200mm f/4 to get a bokeh-pano to isolate the aircraft a little from its background.

Old Warden

 The Mystery ship

 A pair of Mew Gulls

 The DH88 Comet

Chilton DW1: this made a UKAR picture of the week

I made two trips to Old Warden to see displays put on by the Shuttleworth Collection, the second one with Martin. The restored Comet looked amazing!

I've blogged about the Shoreham Airshow previously, so I won't include any of those pictures here, but otherwise the Vulcan and Dragonfly in front of Lancing Chapel would certainly be here.

Finally, a couple of night shots.

I only made it along to one of the Northolt Nightshoots this year: this picture shows the Qinetiq Alpha and a Hawk T2. Best viewed large as it is a stitch of multiple overlapping shots: I'm showing it here at 2000px wide.

 Finally, the Spirit of Kent runs at the Biggin Hill Heritage Hangar. UKAR chose a different one from this set as a picture of the week, but I do like this picture. As with the previous, this is a multi-image stitch, so best viewed large (just click on it).

All in all, I've had great fun this year photographing aircraft. About 3 months to go before everything gets going again: can't wait!

Shoreham Airshow (UK) with a rented D810

DH90A Dragonfly landing in front of Lancing College Chapel

Last weekend I rented a D810, and on the Saturday spent the day at Shoreham for the airshow. I’ve not seen much aviation photography with the D810, and I wanted to know whether it would be a good practical option for this.  My D700 is great for aircraft, which is one reason why I’ve never been tempted by the D800, but the D810 has so many small improvements, it looked very enticing.

I picked it up on the Friday evening and took it out into central London to set it up and give it a first try. Everyone says how good it feels in the hand, and it really does. Once I’d got used to some of the controls, and customized “My Menu” to have my usual items in there (like battery info) and added crop modes (Image Area) and custom setting A6 to turn on/off frame lines, I felt good to go.

Spitfire N3200

The Vulcan banks

The Shoreham airshow is not particularly taxing on a modern auto-focusing system, as there are mainly vintage prop aircraft on display, and even my D70 was (mostly) OK with them ☺. Nevertheless, I wanted to try out the new group AF.

The pictures I’ve put in this post were all taken with the 200-400mm f/4 VR II, except for the monochrome C-47 (24-120mm f/4). All hand held. Just processed through Lightroom 5.6 (except for the banking Vulcan, which had a little additional help from Topaz Clarity). All images were recorded RAW (14-bit NEF, with lossless compression).

Moody Dakota: B&W with Silver Efex Pro 2

I've put a larger set on Flickr. The images here are larger than on Flickr, so worth clicking on these see the full size.

Slightly to my surprise, I found I was using the 1.2 crop a lot. Exiftool tells me that just about 50% of my selects were with the 1.2 crop. About 15% were in DX crop (which I’d expected to use for small aircraft at a distance, but fairly quickly discovered I didn’t really need). The remaining 35% were in FX mode, which was great for anything on the ground or that was large and in flight.

Matrix metering seems very sensitive to any sky in the picture. It is clearly trying to protect highlights (good!) but I found myself dialing in more exposure compensation that usual – up to +1.67 stops for flying aircraft (not helped by the bright grey clouds during the afternoon), and the highlights were still not blown.

F6F takes off. The Group area AF worked perfectly, following the a/c down the runway and not getting distracted by the background.

Focusing worked great. The 200-400 hunted only twice during the whole day (and I’m pretty sure that was due to user error). It locked nicely on to moving subjects and was not distracted by objects in the background. In fact, I don’t think I got a single grossly out of focus image all day. Having said that, I was pushing the shutter speeds at some points to see if the extra pixels would be less sparing on my hand holding technique. My keeper rate always falls off precipitously with any camera below 1/100 when panning at about 400mm, but as it happened, I found I could get enough sharp pictures at 1/80 to get nicely blurred backgrounds on take off or landing. So, all good.

I’m still trying to work out the best processing in Lightroom. Camera Standard and Adobe Standard are very different profiles for the D810, and I’m still trying to decide how best to employ them. Lightroom also seems to have an odd interpretation of the White Balance data. I set the camera to 5560K fixed WB. Lightroom interprets this at about 5950K and adds a tint of -4. Not sure what’s going on there, but not dissimilar to the way it treats my other Nikon images. Nevertheless, Lightroom handles the NEFs well, without much slowing down relative to D700 images.

I also stitched some panos. The image at the end is a three image stitch from FX (36MP) originals. For this, I exported full size 16-bit Tiffs from Lightroom and used the Batch Stitcher in PTGui. This produced a very good pano with no problem. 

RAF Display Typhon pulls vapour: from a 5 MP crop at ISO 800.

Anyhow, I don’t think the pictures in this post will show much that is particularly informative, in the sense that at web resolution, they won’t look much different to a D700 shot. However, the Typhoon shot is a 2841x1887px crop. That represents about 1/6 of the image area, so on a D700 would be a roughly 2MP image: that’s not really enough to do much with, so  that is one extra image I would have missed with the D700. And it was at ISO 800: not too shabby. I don’t like cropping images on the D300 either at ISO 800, so a double win for the D810.

Anyhow, the real test is whether or not the prints look good. I’m going to try to get some images sent off for printing this weekend, so I’ll post a follow up when I have them back.

Two Mustangs and a Spitfire await departure. A three image stitch from FX (36MP) originals. Stitched in the PTGui Batch Stitcher, which handled this with no problem.

Anthony's Aviation Favourites, 2013

In what has become an annual tradition, here's my aviation favorites from this year. Rather a lot for one post, but then who's counting!

These are very approximately in chronological order, although where it is useful, they're grouped by subject. I'll also put these into a set on Flickr (eventually!)  so that you can see the details of each if you're interested.

Anyhow, in keeping with the spirit of Wonky Horizons, you can probably tell I had a huge amount of fun with aviation photography this year. Here's hoping for as much again in 2014!

Happy New Year!