telephoto – Andrew Ferguson dot NET

The Seafair Air Show

August 25, 2014August 25, 2014
Photography

If you will recall, I rented a Nikon 600mm f/4.0D AF-S II VR to take pictures of the Blue Angels in 2012…because why not?

Unfortunately, the Blue Angels were canceled last year, but they were back this year!

So I rented the Nikon 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR…mostly because I could:

From www.kenrockwell.com:

Pros don’t buy these lenses. Nikon and Canon’s pro support programs loan them out for free at sporting events hoping TV viewers see more black or white to influence consumers. Therefore, don’t take any of the prices that seriously. Nikon and Canon probably take a loss on the sale of each of these lenses, considering the small quantities sold. They are created mostly for bragging rights, like the unbeaten Nikon 13mm f/5.6.

It was fun to rent, but shooting anything with a lens like this is hard. Ideally I would just move closer to the airplanes, but until the FAA decides to let drones fly with planes (or the Blue Angels invite me to ride along) I’m stuck with have to use the power of optics.

The issue which shooting with such a large lense is mostly the haze and smoke trails. The heat shimmer kicks in eventually if you get enough air between the you and the object you’re trying to shoot:

You may need to embiggen to get a good look, but the planes basically look like a mosaic because of the heat shimmer — and there’s no amount of Photoshop that can fix that.

From en.wikipedia.org:

Convection causes the temperature of the air to vary, and the variation between the hot air […] and the denser cool air […] creates a gradient in the refractive index of the air. This produces a blurred shimmering effect, which affects the ability to resolve objects, the effect being increased when the image is magnified through a telescope or telephoto lens.

Your best bet is to get a polarizer (which I unfortunately didn’t have) and shoot at 90° to the sun, as shown by the Rayleigh sky model (See also: Polarizing filter). There’s actually a pretty cool tool called SunCalc that will show you where the sun will be at a given date and time — very useful for things like this.

Still, with just over 1500 photos I was bound to get some good ones. Interestingly enough, it’s not that hard to actually track the planes once you get a bead on them. Here are the 4% that made the cut:

800.0 mm || 1/320 || f/9.0 || ISO400 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/6400 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/8000 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2500 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2000 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/5000 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/1600 || f/11.0 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/4000 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/6400 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/4000 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/6400 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/5000 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/6400 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/5000 || f/5.6 || ISO1000 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/3200 || f/7.1 || ISO800 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2500 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

1000.0 mm || 1/1600 || f/7.1 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

1000.0 mm || 1/1000 || f/7.1 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

1000.0 mm || 1/1600 || f/7.1 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2500 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/3200 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2500 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/3200 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2500 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/1600 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2000 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/2500 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

800.0 mm || 1/4000 || f/5.6 || ISO500 || NIKON D7000
Mercer Island, Washington, United States

Blue Angles at Seafair

September 3, 2012September 3, 2012
Photography

Pictures from Seafair have arrived! I worked really hard to cut the field down with this batch. Of the 921 pictures taken, only 29 made the final cut (3.14%).

The shot I really wanted was of the Blue Angles in front of Mount Rainer, I got a couple of good photos, but I want to try again another year. I think I need to be a bit closer to the action in order to get the framing I want. I’m not sure exactly where I’ll need to be, but it will have to be north of I-90 and on the west side of the lake.

All of these pictures were taken on my D7000 with a Nikon 600mm f4.0D AF-S II VR (which I affectionately call “The Beast“) that I rented from Glazers. It was sort of a spur of the moment thing. I literally walked into the shop and asked for the largest lens over 300mm. It was either this or a 400mm zoom lens. Rachel pushed me to get this one, and how could I say no! She was advocating me spending more money on a cool toy! The Glazers rental guys upsold me on an L-mount, which was actually worth it.

I have some video too, but will need to spend some more time to edit it.

I also want to spend some time maturing Aerotags to include some standardization for military planes. I found an amazing collection of military serial/bureau numbers from Joseph Baugher’s that can be searched with Jeremy’s Aircraft Serial Number Search. It takes a little bit of leg work to understand the numbering scheme, but it’s pretty easy to figure out the full serial/bureau number with just the last three digits of the number and the type of aircraft it is.

Shooting the Blue Angels with the Beast

August 4, 2012September 2, 2012
Photography

The Blue Angels are back in town! Yesterday, I got to see them take off from the flight line (one of the many job perks). Today I went out with Rachel and took pictures using the Nikon 600mm f4.0D AF-S II VR that I rented yesterday. The thing is a beast:

Getting ready to shoot the blue angels. Photo by Jacob Blount.

They were all out of the 18mm wide angles. Photo by Jacob Blount.

I got some pretty good shots, but I think there’s a lot of atmospheric crap in the way (i.e. all the air, dust, pollen, etc between my lens and the air planes). I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that, but I’m definitely going to try again tomorrow.

Update: Another picture Jake took, going for the “Rear Window” look…