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Blue Angels at NAS Oceana
Ever since I’ve watched the Blue Angels on Discover Channel (A Year in the Life of Blue Angels), I’ve always wanted to visit an air show with them demonstrating their aerobatics skills.
A few months back, we found out that the Blue Angels will be at the NAS Oceana down in Virginia Beach for the Ocean Air Show last weekend. So Leah and I decided to drive down there on Friday (with a stop at Annapolis to see the US Naval Academy). The air show was fantastic with non-stop aerobatics displays from 10AM to 4PM with the Blue Angels closing out with an hour-long demonstration. The most memorable display, however, was not when we were at the stands. Rather it was at the beginning of the day we were already in the naval air base but still in our car, in a queue to the parking lot. We were in the middle of the tarmac and a F-16C circled around to make a low-level, fast approach to the stands from the side. The flight path took it directly above us so we were treated with watching the F-16C flying towards us at 400mph+ at around 150-200 feet then passed us at 90 degree from right to left. The sound was deafening but glorious as it flew pass us overhead, its engine exhaust glowing with afterburner shooting flame out.
Knowing that we don’t get many opportunity to see the Blue Angels, I’ve rented a long telephoto lens (100-400mm) from LensRentals.com and managed to get lots of great aerial photos (570+). The best ones are on Flickr but here are a few from the collection.
F/A-18 in Russian paint scheme
F/A-18F Super Hornet in transonic regime
Blue Angels F/A-18 in tight turn
My Golf GTI
Ever since I bought the Golf GTI back in March I always planned to take photos of it with nice background. It finally took Leah being stranded in the UK by volcano ash and a burst of sunny weather today to get me to do it.
All of them are taken using my Canon 50D with 50mm f1.8, handheld. This is also the first time I used Aperture 3 in a more in-depth editing role. The brush-in adjustment feature is absolutely awesome!
The whole collection is on Flickr but here are a sample:
Front view
Rear view
GTI badge
Fun with digital photography
Recently I’ve been diving into High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. Initially I used Bracketeer to combine three photos that had been taken with different exposure (-2, 0, +2 stops). But very quickly I became unsatisfied with the output from Bracketeer. After a little research, it turns out Bracketeer only fuse photos with different exposures. Whereas other HDR software also perform tone mapping. After listening to a TWiP podcast about HDR and read through the HDR tutorial by Trey Ratcliff, I decided to try Photomatix Pro last week to see what different result I would get.
To demostrate the difference between Bracketeer and Photomatix, here are two identical photos processed by each software with the original exposure on the left:
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- Original
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- Bracketeer
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- Photomatix
As you can see, the result from Photomatix is so much more natural looking (though it can also produce extremely psychadelic version) than Bracketeer. And more importantly, I get to this very good photo very easily, whereas the options in Bracketeer are extremely technical and confusing.
Both are commercial software with Bracketeer a little bit less expensive than Photomatix. But judging from the output quality, I would thoroughly recommend going straight to Photomatix if you want to experiment with HDR.
