I'm a self described professional amateur, at the end of the day I don't really know what I'm doing. A large majority of my work is done with aviation though I really take pictures of anything that interests me, with varying degrees of success. I started on a Nikon D3000 though now pretty much only shoot on a Nikon Z5 with a 24-200mm lens (Though Sony is making a good argument with those 61mp). I have upgrades planned for the future but like most hobbies, once you really get into it everything becomes expensive. I do have a multitude of other cameras, most of them film, but I rarely ever shoot on them anymore. When I do it's only 35mm because the other formats have become so expensive to find and develop.

Corsair 09.10.24


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.