Dad and I made a rather fast and painful run to the Planes of Fame Museum to photograph a rare and truly awesome looking plane, the Grumman TBM Avenger. We saw the plane at the museum at the beginning of summer in a hanger and wanted to see it fly but it was nothing like what we thought. This plane was designed for offshore bombing along with ship to ship bombing. It could carry a number of arsenals including bombs and torpedoes. For such duty, it’s wings folded up and down for transport on carriers. This plane has a lot of history to it, more than i have knowledge of and it was great to hear the stories that some of these pilots carried with them.
Saturday morning when we got to the museum the skies were the usual grey that southern California brought with it, nothing great but not too bad. Didn’t stop us in the least, we photographed that plane in as many ways on the ground as we could. A little before 11 Dad got his Iphone out and said the sky will clear up, i looked behind me at the grey mess and said sure. At noon we had blue skies, i hate when he does that. I swear he has a blue sky button on there. I won’t complain the planes always look better with blue skies and i couldn’t wait to see the wings unfolded. I was excited about that plane, but was shocked to see how slow it flew across the sky. It makes sense considering it is a bomber but still. We didn’t get much time with it since it only made 4 passes but that was all it took to get a few a good shots. It was big, loud, and great to photograph.
Images captured with D3, top 70-300 AF-S VR, bottom 200-400 VR, on Lexar UDMA Digital Film