Tag Archives: RAFAT

More Super High Frame Rates for the Red’s Syncro Pair

A bit of a theme for me recently has been playing with the super fast frame rates on my camera. Last year I tried this out with the Blue Angels and posted on here about that. It worked well but they were rather distant. At RIAT, I decided to try again but with the Red Arrows this time. The syncro pair will make many crosses during the course of the show so I had a few opportunities.

First, let’s talk about what didn’t go so well. When you select this mode, it will fire off a bunch of shots – I set it to the maximum at 50 – and, when it has taken them, the camera will be effectively locked up until they finish writing. It doesn’t take long, and it shouldn’t matter because not much is happening for a while. However, if you are a dope and forget you have selected it and then take a shot of a plane coming around the turn towards you, you will get a lot of shots you didn’t intend and you may still be writing them when the cross actually happens. I am speculating, of course. No way I would make such a mistake.

The other issue I had was one of choosing focal length. On some crosses I zoomed out quite wide and the jets ended up being further away than expected and quite small in the frame although it gave me multiple framing options. This had been an over correction after having been too tight on a previous cross. Basic stuff but, at least with a bunch of crosses, I had more chances to sort things out.

Then we come to the crux of it. Did I get stuff I liked? Absolutely. I was always tracking the plane coming from the right so my left eye could see enough of the opposite jet, so I did run the risk of having the background jet in focus, but it all worked out fine. The biggest issue is that you end up with a ton of shots to work through. Then again, that is my story of RIAT as a whole! I have included so of the stills here but also an animated GIF of a sequence so you can see how close the frames are to each other. Please forgive the crappy colour space of the GIF.

Return of the Reds

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One of my days at RIAT was spent down towards the threshold of the runway. This meant I was able to get shots of the approaching planes and, hopefully, their touchdown. I say hopefully because a couple of things were working against me. First, there were some distance to go boards that could be in just the wrong spot depending on where the plane touched down. Second, because I was close in and there was a lot of distracting stuff in the background, I was going with a lower shutter speed to give the sense of motion and blur out some of the distractions.

I didn’t have a high success rate with some of these shots which was expected. When going through them, I can be pretty aggressive at culling anything that is not super sharp (at least on a part of the airframe that will be the first point of interest for a viewer) but I do have to bear in mind that I am looking at a high resolution version of the image zoomed in to 100%. When it is a 1600 pixel image on a screen, it will forgive a lot of the detail problems.

Anyway, I got some shots of the jets on approach and then as they touched down. Some of them came out pretty well. I did also use the location for take off shots where, since the planes were just beginning their take off rolls, they weren’t going that fast and getting the blur required was a bit trickier. Some of those will, at some point, show up on here too.

Red Arrows Launch and Recover

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The Red Arrows operated from ramp space at the eastern end of the show grounds at RIAT. I spent some time down there on one of the days. It provided a chance to watch them brief, crew up, start and then recover after the display. Here area. Few shots of the team in action.

Welcome to Seattle Red Arrows

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The Red Arrows have conducted a North American tour this year. It commenced just after RIAT so, while I saw them there, I hoped to catch them at some point during the tour. Their closest displays were in Oregon and Vancouver and I wasn’t able to go to either sadly. They did stage through Seattle, though, so I figured I would go and see them arrive. The twelve jets showed up on a heavily overcast day. They did some flybys over the city and then a run in across Boeing Field. A pair of jets landed directly while the remaining ten flew around a little more – nine ships in formation and one getting some photos. Then it was run and and break to landing before taxiing off to parking.

BOAC and the Red Arrows

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RIAT is known for special formations and British Airways has been part of them in the past. Concorde with the Red Arrows and an A380 with the Red Arrows spring to mind. For 2019 and BA’s 100^th anniversary, they wanted to do something special. The focal point was to be the BOAC liveried 747-400. I shot this jet at SeaTac and covered it in this post. To see it in formation with the Red Arrows sounded pretty good. They put together two passes.

The first was from the right and involved a gentle turn in the direction of the crowd to give a slightly topside view of things. This was nice but the distance involved did mean there was a bit of heat haze to combat. The second pass in the other direction was a more straight pass along the display axis. The sun was popping in and out during this time so the colors popped sometimes and not others. It made for some tricky shooting but it still looked pretty good and it was nice to just watch when not shooting.

Concorde Formations Flypast

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RIAT is known for putting together formations of different types to celebrate certain events. The fiftieth anniversary of the first flight of Concorde resulted in two display teams getting together. Concorde was an Anglo-French collaboration and so was the celebration in this case. The Red Arrows and the Patrouille de France both fly formations to represent Concorde so, for this joint effort, both teams got airborne and flew their two Concorde formations in line astern. They made passes in each direction with the national anthems of each country playing – one on the first pass and the other on the second. It was a simple demonstration but an impressive one all the same.