Air power

Feeling the need to watch some speed I took a quick trip to Modesto to take in the sights of their airport open house fly in this past weekend. I covered Tracy airport’s fly in but I was working. It is kind of hard to enjoy the sights while your working so Saturday’s trip was just for fun. It was also good practice, as I want to head down to Madera at the end of the month for their warbird airshow.







With every lens I could carry crammed into my photo back pack I headed out into the valley heat to bake on the tarmac. Nothing starts off the day better than the sight and sound of a vintage World War II P-51 Mustang ripping along the runway on a high-speed pass. It would have been even nicer if I had would have had my camera out of the backpack. Fortunately he made a second pass and I fired away.







The first thing I noticed is that they let crowd stand close to the runway. Real close. I found myself debating which lens to shoot with as the 300 mm telephoto was giving me almost to tight of an in-camera crop.







While there wasn’t an airshow I was treated to a variety of airplanes making high and low speed passes along the runway for the crowd. You could tell the airplane nerds, we stood as close to the runway as they would let us, our Canon cameras at the ready straining skyward for the first glimpse of the next airplane arriving.




I stayed for a couple of hours, filled an 8-gig memory called started on second before I called it a day. I like the results; I even remembered to slow the shutter speed down to make sure I had the propellers spinning for a better in flight appearance in the photos. Next stop if everything goes well will be the sun-baked runways of Madera.