Well it has been a couple of days but i wanted to continue with some of the events that happened this past weekend at the ISAP convention. The big treat for the group, especially for some of us newbies who have been to an ISAP convention before, was going to Miramar to photograph one of the marine units group of V22 Ospreys. Yea that’s right the Osprey! It was really freakin cool, but man are these some funky looking planes.
We get to the hanger where one Osprey is out for us to look at and go through while another was being worked on that we weren’t supposed to photograph. No biggie there were plenty of other subjects. Immediately when we arrived everyone went to the open hanger door to see all the Ospreys lined up on the ramp. Some of us poked around the inside of the plane which was pretty cool. The amazing thing to me was the size of the rotary blades, they are massive! I took one shot with a 12-24 and at 12mm i couldn’t get all three blades in the picture, they are just huge! Pretty impressive though that all three blades can collapse for carrier use.
As you can see up on top there really was a line of planes and even more of to the right. You can see that the engines rotate from a vertical position to a horizontal position for take off, flight and hovering. That’s what kept tripping me up was seeing those engines that way. Most fix wing aircraft have the engine attached under the wing where it doesn’t move but provides thrust forward hence the long runway take offs. It is actually a pretty ingenious design, not only is the Osprey fast but is more stable when hovering then a helicopter.
Of course the best part was seeing the plane in the air for all it’s entire flight from takeoff to landing. We were even fortunate enough to have one Osprey hover for us down at the end of the ramp before it flew off. The only down side to the day was like often in southern California there was some heat shimmer coming off the runway but that didn’t affect the planes from doing there thing.
These shots were taken with the 200-400 VRI. I kept trying to get the planes that were static in a line along with the plane hovering in a single click. The Osprey hovering was actually quite cooperative and I say that because, in order to get a good blur in the propellers i had to be at 1/60th or lower shutter speed and hand holding a 200-400 at that range can get quite difficult when working with moving planes. Wasn’t hard with this guy.
We ended the shoot with two Ospreys landing and pulling over in front of the hanger. We couldn’t be there the whole time due to safety reasons but we were there long enough to see them coming in on the left. It was pretty amazing getting to see this new high tech piece of technology in action and even better to know where some of the technology was has come from. My thanks go out to all those that made it possible for us to be there and to all those that have to use the aircraft.
Images captured with Nikon D3, AF-S 70-200, AF-S 200-400 VRI, on Lexar UDMA Digital Film