Gas to drive to the airfield: $6.60 Admission to the RC airshow: $5 [attachment=1] Catching a perfect shot of a remote controlled F-4 going 100mph in the narrow field of view of a 400mm (plus 1.6 crop factor) lens: priceless. Okay, explanations. This was a "fly in", a gathering for aircraft, but it's sort of the opposite meaning of the traditional fly in. Normally you literally fly in, in your full scale passenger aircraft. But this was for remote controlled planes, so it's really more of a drive in. This was a jet themed event, and these jets can be large. The hardcore people have a trailer to hold all their stuff. These aircraft are powered by real gas turbine (or jet, to the uninitiated) engines. They're amazingly compact, you can literally hold the smaller models in one hand. On the one hand I'm amazed, but on the other I know it's really not that surprising. The irony is that a jet engine is really simpler than a piston engine. A piston engine has so many tiny little moving parts, so many functions that have to operate together. Little valves, pumps, timing mechanisms, it's a nightmare. A jet engine sucks air in, compresses it, burns it, and lets it shoot out the rear end. It's simple, it's reliable, the only problem is that it requires some fairly sophisticated metallurgy to handle the temperatures involved. Speaking of which, if you look closely you can see the distortions from the hot exhaust of the engine. I wasn't thinking about that when I was shooting, but it makes for dynamic looking pictures. This wasn't really the best situation to highlight that effect though. Unfortunately they're still expensive, a large part of the cost of these aircraft is the engines. I should state that the 100mph figure was a complete guess. I can't judge the speeds. I know that they're entirely capable of breaking 200mph, but technically they're restricted to sub 200mph speeds. I suspect some of the people were breaking the 200mph limit, but I couldn't track them when they went that fast in any case. I don't have any hard info on the size of that F-4, but I do know something about this F-18: [attachment=2] It was said to weigh about 65 pounds. With something like 40 or 45 pounds of thrust. Even at that the pilot said that he normally kept it flying a lot slower than it could go, he never fully opened up the throttle except for takeoff. He chose to fly slower, to make it look more realistic in flight. Happily there were people there who just wanted to go fast and have fun (not that I don't appreciate the effort put into a good scale performance). Such as this thing: [attachment=3] I don't remember the particular model name, but it's by a manufacturer who makes these things out of carbonfiber. Carbonfiber is such a sexy material, you can end up with glass smooth surfaces and can also have perfectly smooth curves. It's also exceptionally strong. That was referred to as the "Scooby Snack Powered" jet, because it's themed after the Mystery Machine, the van from Scooby Doo. Oh, and because it says "Scooby Snack Powered" on the nose. You can see the engine poking out of the back of the fuselage, it's externally mounted on this model. A detail I didn't notice in person is that the wings have "jinkies" written on the undersides. Another scale model that was flown was this Panther: [attachment=4] Another one that only barely shows the heat mirage effect of the exhaust gasses. It was just taking off when I got this, the landing gear is only partially retracted. I went to this event to see cool stuff, of course. But I brought my camera to get some heavy duty panning practice. Other people had 70-200 or 70-300 lenses, which were really better suited to the situation. But I was stubborn, I wanted to see what my 400mm could do. It was sized so that when the jets made low passes they almost filled the frame. Scooby Snacks is posted uncropped, that was really as big as it was in the viewfinder. Tracking a small jet moving at those kinds of speeds was incredibly difficult, I was actually flat out unable to accelerate the lens fast enough to keep tracking the really fast jets as they got closer, as their apparent motion increased. The fast passes were exercises in futility, I'd need to start the camera tracking behind them and I'd have to start speeding up in advance. Even though I was using shutter speeds of 1000th of a second or more I still got a lot of blurries too. However tracking a bird in flight should feel a lot easier now. I saw one odd camera there. A Hasselblad, a digital medium format camera, it probably cost at least $20,000. In retrospect I really wish I'd given that guy my email address and asked for some sample pictures from the event to see what he got, but that was completely the wrong application for a camera like that. Maybe it would have been more at home doing beauty shots of the aircraft that were on the ground, but he was up there with us 35mm people, tracking the airborne jets with the rest of us. I'm just astounded that my first sighting of a Hasselblad in the field was at an RC airshow. That's like... like seeing someone using the $25,000 Sigma 200-500 F2.8 for portrait shooting. Or for macro photography of wildflowers. Mind you I should talk, using a wildlife lens in an airshow application. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
