Airshow heaven

A great weekend that made a big change from an intensive month of bird photography, the first shot is of the beautifully preserved Westland Lysander at the Shuttleworth collection, flying in the evening airshow, this and many more can be seen on my Flickr gallery.
The other 4 images are from a great day at the Duxford's spring show; a hard days work..not! I would love to get more jobs as utterly pleasurable as this was, the guys from "Photo-Plus" magazine joined me and reader Vince Scott, the brief; teach Vince how to photograph airshows, the feature will cover 10 pages in the July issue, so order a copy at your newsagent now.
I will add a longer report on this in a few days, but you will see in the last image that we met up with the 2010 Hawk display pilot, Tom Saunders, who happily posed with his jet for a load of images.

Run to the hill's

At long last I made my first trip to the Welsh hills for 2010, it was December when I was there last!
Cad west on the first day saw several passes from the RAF Valley Hawk's that soon got the eye and panning back in shape, then in fabulous late afternoon light we got a Hercules, plus T12 and GR9 Harriers. I packed up at 6pm because the shadow of Cader was lengthening across the pass, true to form I got "carparked" by a GR4 at 6:10 pm.
Day 2 was a great day; I tried a new site that has been in my sight's for several months; it has struck me as being the other best place (to Corris) to shoot F15E's, the LN boy's turned up, did the passes just "as it say's on the tin" and landed Keith Williams and I a Low-fly jackpot win, with the Boscombe Alpha jet, GR4s, 2 Typhoons, a Hercules and several Hawks we just needed a Harrier to complete the set!

Civil stuff at Stansted

OK its not fast jets down low in the Welsh valleys still, hopefully the weather will coincide with a gap in my schedule so I can get there; but Stansted for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon can be quite good too, the planes are colourful!
NigelBlakephoto is now on Twitter too.

Zero six, perfect!

I find it very difficult to drive past Lakenheath and not stop! On Thursday I was there for quite a long time as the weather was good, the wind was from the east and departures were zero six.

Need a fast jet fix!

I really do need a fast jet fix, I haven't been up a Welsh hill for ages, a combination of too many other demands on my time, my Barn Owl addiction (see my birds blog), the weather and that it's a long journey to Wales and "The Loop" has been lacking in activity compared to how it was last year.
However I have popped into Mildenhall a few times when I've been out that way, had a couple of visits to Luton airport and shot a few "civvies" and I have also started scanning a vast amount of my old slides too, see the F-111F image below (and lots more SR71, Phantoms etc on my Flickr). Now! I know it's easy to look back with "rose tinted specs" on and bang on about how good the old days were.......... but the old days were just awesome!

Eagles again

I've not been out to photograph aircraft as much recently, mainly because its a long way to the "Mach loop" and the days are short, I have had a couple of trips down there though, not much traffic and some pretty dull weather, although a couple of Harriers a Tornado and an F15e or two made it worthwhile!
I also had a day at Lakenheath shooting F15s in their own heat haze, that was a good day.

Lysander and sunset.

With my time being taken up by a catalogue shoot at the moment I've not had a chance to get to Wales for a couple of weeks, however I have managed to get a few images of some of the Old Warden aircraft.
The Lysander put on a great display in some real nice light.