RAF museum Cosford airshow 2013 pics

[rochie]

ok Terry and i attended this years airshow at the RAF museum Cosford.

my Daughter and i were a little late as so many people turned up that they were turned away unless you had a pre booked ticket !
we sat in a traffic jam for 4 hours just 6 miles from the airfield ( have a sun burned right arm to prove it ) !!!!
we missed the first few acts but saw most of what i wanted to see, saw the Sea Fury from the car as i was parking !

a good day was had by all even though it was a little chaotic i think due to the massive number of people attending and i think the show organisers were a little caught out by the numbers.

so on with the pics and once again my little Fuji bridge camera did me proud.

as i said we missed the first few displays and arrived just as the F-86 Sabre was flying

BBMF Spitfire PR XIV

BBMF Hurricane IIC made to look like a MkI

 

[rochie]

BBMF Lancaster

 

[rochie]

all three BBMF planes together

 

[Maximowitz]

Great photos!

 

[rochie]

cheers mate

Lynx Mk7, and no some pics are not the wrong way up the Helicopter is !

 

[Thorlifter]

Thanks for sharing Karl. It always amazes me how a helicopter can go upside down.

 

[rochie]

thanks

Red Arrows

Chinnok, Apache and C-130

 

[rochie]

the star of the show !

 

[rochie]

more Vulcan ending with my favorite picture.

 

[rochie]

last few odds and sods.

BBMF Dakota

Sally B

Spitfire PR XI going home

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Fantastic pic shooting Karl and great to see the Vulcan in full flight. You did well my friend and look at all that blue sky, all your summer has come in one hit.

 

[rochie]

cheers mate it was a good day and seeing, hearing and feeling the Vulcan again was a massive highlight for me, impressed April as well !

 

[vikingBerserker]

Dam, the Vulcan is one sexy aircraft!

 

[Crimea_River]

Excellent shots Karl! Looks like the weather and performers all pulled out the stops for you.

 

[Aaron Brooks Wolters]

Karl............................the last shot of the Vulcan...................ROCKS.
You did excellent sir! Very nice set of photos.:notwothy:

 

[B-17engineer]

Love the Lanc!!

 

[Airframes]

Great stuff Karl!
I'm still sorting through the 800+ shots I took with the two cameras - a lot of trial and error with the new Nikon, with some puzzling results for what I thought the camera was set on, but some usable stuff too.
As Karl mentioned, the organisers were caught out, with chaos on the roads, and the field absolutely packed with cars and people. Regrettably,the majority of the crowd seemed to be 'locals', with little or no interest in aviation, just there for a day out. It was impossible to get anywhere near the display crowd line, with pathways blocked by picnic tables and chairs back for 300 metres or so, so some shots were taken from around 300 metres away from the fence line at best, near the runway threshold, with most of mine from 500 to 800 metres, or much more, from the fence line. (the display axis was about 350 to 400 metres from the crowd line).
The show seemed to start early, as Mick and I were arriving, and any commentary was impossible to hear from our locations, but I've just found out that a certain Captain Wales, aka Prince Harry, was displaying in the Apache, apparently announced to the crowd just seconds before his display!
Here's a few of my shots for starters, not in display sequence, and I'll post more as I sort them. And yes, I know the props have been 'frozen' on the first ones - I was experimenting with various camera settings!
Anyway, here's the Yak display team, and the BBMF's Dakota.

 

[Crimea_River]

Good ones Terry! Who's the bloke in the C-47?

One thing I learned from Gary when I was a Dux was to set the camera to a time value setting of 1/125 or so to get a nice prop blur. The C-47 looks perfect but the Yak props have stopped. Otherwise, excellent pics and nicely framed - much better than mine but hope to get more practice next weekend in Hamilton.

 

[vikingBerserker]

Very cool!

 

[Airframes]

Thanks guys, and yes Andy, I mentioned the 'frozen' props on the Yaks in my post. The Yak pics were some of the early shots, and I was experimenting with various camera settings, starting on 'Auto', then moving to AF-C, with shutter priority and spot metering, then eventually to Auto focus mode, manual shutter and aperture.
It's the first time I've used the Nikon DSLR, and needed to find the best combination of settings for these conditions and action. The 70 to 300mm Sigma lens is a bit slow in AF-C mode, due to the auto re-focusing, so I found that, overall, the last mode mentioned was better, although the metering got fooled a few times with cloud backgrounds!
When I can afford to, I might get a Nikon 70 to 300mm or larger, with stabilisation, as the focusing is much faster than the Sigma - a must for fast-action work! (Oh to have the simplicity of a manual lens combined with a DSLR!).