I am a little behind in blogging again which isn’t abnormal when times get busy. This past weekend was a very busy time with very little sleep. As some of you might know from my Dad’s site, last weekend we were in Florida with another adventure in the new series of Air to Air workshops. This time we were at the fabulous Fantasy of Flight like we were for Precon this past April. Fantasy of Flight has some truly spectacular aircraft, all of which has its own unique history. Now the guy who owns Fantasy of Flight is Kermit Weeks who has in his collection over 160 aircraft, that’s a few stories! We were lucky and got to work with some really cool planes including the one up above the Shorts Sunderland. This plane usually never comes out of the hanger, thankfully there was an event that weekend and it had to come out for space. This plane used to fly but unfortunately it hasn’t been flown in some time making it in need of repairs now. It’s still a great plane, massive but great!
The night we flew in which was Friday night, there was a massive thunderstorm that went through the area and Saturday morning when we went to the airfield we had a nice layer of fog. The fog is just a great backdrop for the planes. The airfield already is super clean with a lake and trees in the background and of course the best part is no fences! The addition of the fog creates this feeling or allusion of being back in England on a cold morning right before battle, which is quite nice with some of the planes we were working with including the P51C Mustang and the TP-40. The Duck was a favorite of Dad’s for some time so naturally he wanted to photograph it. Thanks to Kermit we were able to.
The major highlight for the workshop was the P51C Mustang. Photographing the Duck, Sunderland, TP-40, and a few other planes, was absolutely marvelous but the P51C was just beautiful. The amount of detail and time spent in this plane is obvious. The plane is painted in the colors of the Tuskegee Airmen, in particular it was painted in the colors of the groups ace Lee Archer. Although not seen here, the plane actually has his signature on the armor platting in the cockpit. Most of the morning was actually spent around this plane. Once the sun came up and the fog left we spent hours working these planes from the ground all the way up to the top of a ladder. It was amazing. This one plane took over an hour to shoot all the angles and details, and even then i know there were images missed.
Like i said the sun rose and the fog began to disperse. In a normal morning shooting statics we tend to spend a couple of hours at location. Usually before sunrise to 8am or 9am. Not long, a couple of hours and then it’s breakfast. Well this morning was so good that we arrived at 6am and didn’t leave until 10am when the museum actually opened to the public. It was that good of a shoot, no one wanted to stop. I can honestly say that there are more images in my files then there is time to process them and put them up on my blog. The last plane that caught my eye, was of course the PBY which had a great background with the ground fog. I still love this plane, can’t wait to see it in the air, and i thought i would share it with you all.
Images captured with Nikon D3, AF-S 70-200 VRII, AF-S 24-70, on Lexar UDMA Digital Film