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As I said before, there are no airshows near me for quite a few months, meaning that either I wait to test out the new lens
or I try to do some wildlife photography. Seeing as how most people don't like to wait to play with a new toy I decided to take
it out and try my hand at wildlife photography, something I've never done before.
Let's just say it was an enlightening experience. Starting with, the lens is HEAVY. Almost four and a half pounds. My unsteadiness
with trying to hold it out coupled with it reaching out three times what I used to meant that trying to focus on a small object, like
a bird, was surprisingly difficult. Also I've never shot anything that small. I'm used to shooting stuff the size of a school bus or
larger that follows a predictable path. Now a small object that seems to be able to pull a 180 in the air, very difficult. Out of all
the photos I took this was one of only two usuable photos.
Maybe next time I go out I'll be graced with a coyote since I've shot sled dogs before so at least I would be able to handle that much better.
I finally got myself a new toy that I've been eyeing. Please welcome the NIKKOR 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3. Beside the fact that this is
the, physically, biggest lens I've ever owned, it is also the longest. Everything I have ever shot with the Z mount is at most
200mm and I did fool around with 300mm on the old F mount. 600mm doesn't even compare to them in its range. Unfortunately there
are no airshows in my area till May, the whole reason I aquired this lens, so I'll have to take it out on a nicer day to stretch its
lens on some bird.
Well, since the airshow season is almost over (at least the ones I will be attending), and I want to populate this a bit, I’m going to
show off one of my favorites.
This was taken at Oshkosh 2023, the second airshow I had been to since I started attending them earlier that year. I still have pretty
much no idea what I was doing with photography at this point. I had started photography two years earlier but everything I had done was
with landscapes. The first airshow I had been to, while enjoyable, did not yield many usable photos. Essentially I would point the camera
at what I wanted to take a picture of and that was it, everything from most of the setting to white balance was mostly foreign to me and
as a result most photos were blurry or were horribly over/under exposed to the point where my limited editing skills couldn’t fix them.
My failures from then though helped me learn for a few weeks later when I went to Oshkosh. I definitely still had a lot of problems and
still quite a number of photos were unusable but I was far happier overall with the results.
I don’t really know what it is about this photo that makes it stand out among the other 4,000 I took that day, maybe the contrast, maybe
since it was one of the first that I was properly proud of, but even when I’ve tried to recreate it at other air shows the end result
doesn’t feel the same.
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