Blog entries tagged with "airshow"

Right now I am sitting at the airport, halfway through a hot chocolate and looking out over the planes taxiing up and down the apron.

This is just the first leg, the goal of which is to get to Canberra for the three day Open Source Developers Conference. While there were two days of miniconfs, I am not going to any of them. My plan for this afternoon once I arrive in Canberra is to be a tourist as this is only the second time in my memory (but not according to photo evidence…) that I have been there.

So far this is typical for me as I have been to every OSDC since they started in Melbourne many years ago. What makes this a multi-stage trip is what happens after.

On Saturday, the day after the conference, is an airshow. Not the Avalon one, but one held at the Temora Aviation Museum on Saturday. While I am at the last day of the conference, Damien (of the previous roadtrip) will be driving up from Melbourne to Canberra and then we will both head out to Temora that night ready for 8:30am entry to the airshow.

So an airshow is the second stage. The third is the largest as, after returning to Canberra for a day, we will be spending the next six days returning to Melbourne via the south east coast of New South Wales and Victoria. Before we get to the coast we will go through the hills behind Canberra, stopping off at the sites of the old tracking stations, you know, the one that actually received the moon walk broadcast…

As we return through the Lakes Entrance and Orbost area, it turns out that the Alpine Rally of East Gippsland is being run that weekend. It may be good if we can find a spectator location and get some good photos, but it might be bad if the forest roads we were planning of using through the state forest are closed. I was hoping we would know by now, but they haven’t released the spectator information.

Oh well, next stop Canberra.

For the past three days I have been up at Halls Gap in the Grampians with the camera club. Although I returned home yesterday, I took an extra day of leave because I knew that in addition to the long drive, the weekend itself would be tiring because of late nights and early mornings.

So today I didn’t do much, except some photo sorting. Although I did do a little bit of sorting through my photos from the weekend (mostly getting them off the laptop I borrowed) I decided that it would be better to return to the backlog.

The previous weekend I went out to Healesville Sanctuary on the Saturday, and then to the biannual Air Pageant at the Point Cook RAAF Museum on the Sunday. It was the Point Cook photos that I turned to.

This day really made me regret selling my 75-300mm lens when I sold my Canon 400d. Although it was the kit lens, by definition cheap, it would have given me reach that my 17-85mm lens just does not have. I also could have thought ahead and asked at the camera club. Borrowing a 28-300mm would have been excellent as I would have only needed one lens, but borrowing a 70-200mm f/4 would have been good as well.

The big downside of having a maximum focal length of 85mm was that most of what could have been good shots were just too small in the frame which meant that when cropped down they were too noisy with not enough detail. I shot 2000 photos on the day and my first pass brought the count down to 262. My efforts today brought that down further to the 58 that are now up on Flickr.

The weather was a bit ordinary for an airshow. Mostly overcast with patches of blue sky. That worked for some shots as it cast a moody feel:

While at other times the break in the clouds gave both lighting and a contrasting backdrop:

See Point Cook Air Pageant 2010 for all of the images.

Something else that I have done with this set is to try to give each image a unique name, not just “Place/Event (#)”. This did take extra time, but it is something that I should be doing. Plus it makes the subject of the photo much easier to identify.

Last night and this afternoon I finally got around to putting the better photos from the airshow up on Flickr:

– Australian International Airshow 2007

I haven’t quite finished putting meaningful titles and tags on all of the photos…

I have just returned from the Airshow. Apart from a few things (the incident in the Burnley tunnel delaying our journey, it being windy and dusty, poor traffic management leaving the carpark) it was well worth it.

I ended up taking around 500 photos although a large number of those were taken using the continuous mode on my camera in order to try and capture a good shot of the aerial displays. I’m not going to sort through them (and upload them to Flickr) until sometime next week as I am going to wait until I can get a copy of the photos Damien took.

Although in the last week I have uploaded some other photos:

• Puffing Billy (February 2006)
• Fire Services Museum
• Steamrail Open Weekend 2007
• Melb.PM March 2007
• Dandenong Police Paddocks Reserve (March 2007)