Tag Archives: long

Shooting Deliberately Tight on Arriving Airliners

The arrival of the Starlux A350 has already appeared in a previous post. I got there a little ahead of its scheduled approach and, since I was playing around with using my longer lens, I decided to try shooting some of the preceding arrivals with the same lens from head on to get some tighter compositions and see just what would work before the planes got chopped off by the limited field of view. I had a variety of types coming in from the little E175s to 777Fs. They gave me some things to work with and I quite like how some of them came out. A bit of variety is good when the subjects are very repetitive.

Strange Little Isolated Tree

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Sometimes you just don’t have the right gear with you. I had gone to Juanita Bay after work and was only carrying one camera with the 500mm on it. Looking down in to the water to one side of me, I was quite taken by a stump in the water that had a new growth of a small tree coming from the top of it. It was too far away to get a decent shot with the phone so the 500mm was the only option. I took a sequence of shots to stitch together later on. I quite like the separation that you get with using such a long lens for a shot like this. I wonder how large the tree will ultimately grow to be given the limitations of its home!

Experimenting With Night Shots of Ferries

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With the ferries coming and going to the terminal at Orcas, I was able to have plenty of chances to take photos. I did get standard shots of the boats in low light conditions. They are not easy to shoot since they are constantly moving. No long exposures at low ISOs are possible so it is high ISO and the associated noise. However, I did decide to experiment with some long exposures and blending of shots. The boats make a curving approach to the terminal. I thought this might make a nice long exposure. It worked okay but the curve is a bit disguised by being too low down to really appreciate it. However, it was fun to try.

Floating Down The Runway in a Jumbo

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Airline operates are usually pretty predictable – at least provided the weather is not too extreme. You tend to get jets on glide path and at the appropriate speed. This results in touchdowns being reasonably close to the same place each time. However, poor are flying these planes and they introduce some variability to the mix. A recent visit to SFO included one United 747 that was a bit off target.

First I should point out that the runway in use is a long one and that a 747 at the end of a flight can get down safely in a lot less space than is provided. In this case, that helped. The 747 came across the threshold and flared for landing. It was higher than normal and must have been carrying some speed because it floated a long way down the runway. When it eventually touched down, we had the city skyline behind it which only emphasized how far it had gone. No harm done and it exited with plenty to spare but it was conspicuous enough to have got all present commenting on it.

Night Star Trails

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My buddy Paul was in town and we had a day of shooting and exploring planned. However, we wanted to have a go at star trails in the evening as well. Consequently, we set up at Schellville as the sun went down to shoot the trails around the Douglas DST parked on the field. I set up two cameras at different angles and with different lenses to try and maximize what I got. The sun was still going down when I started so the exposure was varying a bit more than I was prepared for but a little tweaking in post got things back together. We also did some light painting on the airframe in a couple of frames to make the scene pop a bit more.

The biggest thing I learned during this was to start when it is darker and to take mosquito protection. I got badly bitten during the early part of the shoot and the bites reacted quite severely! Also, doing this in the winter so you don’t have to wait so late for it to get dark might also be a good plan. However, it went reasonably well and I have a few things I will know to do differently next time. I might also try a trail on one camera and a time lapse on the other.