November Calendar

November Calendar

Leesburg Airshow 2017

Fun event at the local regional airport in Leesburg. The wing walker is from the flying circus out of Culpepper VA, not too far from us.

It is amazing to see the historic planes up close. Though we were not that close. A perfect opportunity to exercise some photography skills.

The main picture looks like I am in the a plane flying next to him, but in reality they did a low flyby and the lens I was using created the illusion.

This article helps explains what happens when you optically zoom in on something.

Digital Zoom (like a smart phone) actually crops the image to make it larger, and to most that is zooming in. On a Camera with lens that has different focal lengths (mm) zooms differently, it changes the perspective of what we are seeing.

A classic example is the photo of the BIG MOON in behind something.

If you attempted this photos you were probably disappointed that your eye saw a very large moon, but the camera produced a photo with a small one. The link above has a set of 6 photos at the bottom of the article. The circle of rocks looks different depending on the focal length of the shot. For each of the photos the photographer needed to move closer of further away to keep the tree on the left the same perspective. To take a photo of the moon and make it look large to an object in the foreground, you need to move way back, use a very large focal length (zoom) to the object in the foreground, and this forces the background (the moon) to get very large.

Back to the plane, I was standing about 100m from the runway, with my 500mm lens with a 1.4x multiplier, resulting in a 700mm zoom (big for cameras). This allowed me to have the planes fill the frame, also made it hard to chase them as they move very fast at that magnification.

Standing 100m, angled up slightly for the low bypass of the plane, the clouds that were actually quite far off, were magnified (like the moon), and made to look like they are very close to the plane. With no other objects in the frame to see how far off the ground the plane was, it appears that I am beside the plane high up in the clouds.

Here is another example from that day. This photo the plane looks like I am slightly lower than it in the sky;

Reality is that the plane is very close to the ground, and I cropped out the trees to take away the point of reference.

Another shot as the plane was approaching even show more how close to the ground he really was

A few more photos from the day;

It was a fun day, and I do love this photo.