You are currently browsing the daily archive for May 7th, 2008.
Hi
Well I’m busy trying to sort out my hard drives into something of a workable archive in Lightroom. Through my big office widows I can see the mornings sun has been replaced with an ominous grey. Was that a rumble of thunder?
A few minutes ago, I came across this old scanned image of mine. It dates back to Mildenhall Airfete 86 or 87 and was taken on my big heavy “everything manual” Zenith TTL with, with its mid range lens, felt like a bazooka. It seems strange to think that in the latter years of the cold war I was “shooting” Nato aeroplanes with a Soviet camera!
The weather that day started sunny and warm, the cumulus building up and up until, like today, it all went very sudden grey. Blast, it might rain I thought, and boy, it certainly did. The crowd line was no longer ten people deep as many of the 200000 people dashed back to cars, the gift tents or the hanger, where for a few pounds or dollars, you could buy a really greasy BBQ cooked burger to go with your icy tin of US beer, and then eat it under the wing of an F-15 Eagle while pretending to be American!
I stayed put, as a 16 years old an airshow was a massive treat for me, and I wasn’t going to miss anything, especially as the Royal Air Force’s aerobatic display team the Red Arrows were on soon. However there was something very exciting about to drift through the Suffolk air that afternoon, and it wasn’t burger smoke!
“Weather or Not”
It almost looks like a ”mid west” Tornado, but we are in the rural flatlands of Suffolk, in Eastern UK. But on the right you can see the you can see the moist air being sucked downwards and then into the rotating tunnel cloud. Not surprisingly flying stopped for a while, the unstable air around this cloud would certainly cause some unscheduled aerobatics!
But it’s not a Tornado. This is a “roll cloud” that forms along a storms “gust front” when cold air from a storm downdraft lifts warm air above the condensation level to produce a menacing looking site. The Red Arrows have their smoke trails too, but this cloud was one rare aerial display I was very glad to see. Even so I only took one exposure of it, and I’ve never seen another picture of it on the web, despite searching! OK mine has not been seen for 20+ years either!
That leads me on, and sort of back to what I’m meant to be doing right now. Going by some online galleries you’d think that you have to take 70+ exposures of each flypast now days, and that kind of amazes me. I only took one exposure of the cloud because I had only taken two rolls of 36exp Fujichrome 100 with me that day to an 8 hour air show, and by now we were very close to the end of the day! Back then, when a roll of film would sometimes last me for several days out, plus other photo missions, many of my competition successes came from sequences of just one or two exposures. Two films in one day was a luxury! And thankgoodness, the trunk of slides sitting in the corner of my office, awaiting the day I finally buy a decent film scanner, is big enough as it is!!!
Take Care! Steven
Visitors Comments