Cleveland Airshow Labor Day 2014

I got so many more good photos this year. Still working on a bunch, but I had to share this one. They set it up with explosions in the background and the two plans intercepting the jet truck. Since I was on the far end of the runway, the truck had already passed the explosions by the time everything was in view. I got lucky though because in other photos there were flags in the way or one of the planes was not in frame. Wish I had more sky in the photo.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/p2oq​PF

That's pretty spectacular!


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Nice! You had a lot better vantage point for that one than I had.

Great stuff from either vantage point. I'm guessing Skip Stewart put on a great show but who is piloting the other one.

cicopo wrote in post #17130439
Great stuff from either vantage point. I'm guessing Skip Stewart put on a great show but who is piloting the other one.

Melissa Pemberton

Oh wow eagle. I'm guessing you were in the "box seats"? I was all the way down on the left where the planes came to taxi on the runway. We had some great views as the planes left for the runway. I think we got there about 9:30 and managed to get basically 2nd row from the fence. There was enough room for one seat which I asked if my son could use. That allowed me a pretty good view.

For the life of me though I do not understand why they put all those darn flags in the ground to block your view. They have a truck that gets blocked. They have planes flying only a couple feet from the surface of the runway and the flags block them too.

Example:

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/oZsr​eo

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/p2ed​f6

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/p2sP​Zh

Skip's trademark take off. Pretty impressive doing a knife edge the moment you get airborne. I saw him perform in Cozumel a few trips ago & we watched from the side of the runway. Crazy but what a rush.

Thanks re the Milissa Pemberton info. I've seen here perform locally but in a very different way.

mikeinctown wrote in post #17130615
Oh wow eagle. I'm guessing you were in the "box seats"? I was all the way down on the left where the planes came to taxi on the runway. We had some great views as the planes left for the runway. I think we got there about 9:30 and managed to get basically 2nd row from the fence. There was enough room for one seat which I asked if my son could use. That allowed me a pretty good view.

For the life of me though I do not understand why they put all those darn flags in the ground to block your view. They have a truck that gets blocked. They have planes flying only a couple feet from the surface of the runway and the flags block them too.

I was just behind the fence at the back of the box seats. A little to the right of where the announcers were. Them flags are annoying that's for sure. This is the best I got of Skips knife edge, had to grop some of the crowd out. What lens were you using?

Some great shots here! They certainly didn't skimp on the size of the explosions - great and unusual backdrop.

Love the knife edge shots too - recently got to see someone do that in a Pitts Special at a small airshow in Norfolk, amazing stuff so close to the ground and so quickly after take off! What these guys can do with those planes is just incredible - they fling them around like radio control models.

5D2 with a 100-400L. I was using center point focus so I've had to crop a lot of grass out of many shots. I had the hood on but wish I had a CPL or something because I was shooting at F10 much of the time at ISO 100 and still had shutter speeds that wouldn't blur the propellers. For the jets and some of the action I tried to bump the ISO up to 320-400 to catch some shadow detail, but my shutter speeds then were 1600+. Still not comfortable with using or quickly changing outer point focus so many shots aren't as good as they could be.

As I'm sure you noticed, the haze was crazy bad. Looked like blue skies standing there, but so many photos I have just have grey sky. I've had to really play with color saturation and contrast in DPP. Lightroom may have been a little easier as I could make a custom setting and apply it to all. Te shots taken earlier in the day of the bombers came out much better, for sure.

Nice shots. I like your vantage point too. I was in the box seats on the far side from where you were. I despise the flags too. I had a speaker to contend with and a flag about 8-10ft on both sides of the speaker. Very annoying.

Seeing the vantage points on your shots makes me wish I could have gone multiple days to shoot from different spots.