I thought I would start a series of my own observations on simple, and complex things that come up for me in photography.
I woke up this morning feeling less than well. I had a fever all night and didn’t get much sleep and so I decided to call in sick. After napping a bit I surfed the internet as usual when I woke up and saw that President Obama would be landing at LAX today. LAX is about five minutes from my house and I wondered if I would be able to see Air Force One from my house. Probably not.
I did a little research and found that his schedule had him arriving at LAX at 1:35 pm and I debated with myself whether or not to try to drive down there and get a picture. Given as close as I live to the airport, it’s surprising that I really haven’t found any remarkable locations for shooting air traffic there. Any point of view of the entire airport would really require a longer lens than I own and still require a bit of luck.
However, just south of me is a Home Depot store that I frequent and it is notable in that there is a constant stream of landing traffic that passes only hundreds of feet over the parking lot – gear down, flaps out. Now LAX has four major runways, but if the plane was going to land on 24R, the north-most landing strip, its path would take it directly over my local home center. One-in-four that it would pass overhead.
I debated all morning, considering how I was feeling and all, but I knew I had to get out at sometime to get juice and other sick supplies (my damn cat is too lazy to help out, even when I’m sick). I did a little research and found the the LAX tower frequencies (you can even listen to tower traffic over the internet – pretty cool) and plugged them into my scanner. Then I checked my camera. I mounted my 70-200 f/2.8 with my 1.7x teleconverter and remembering the air show I shot a couple weekends ago and knowing that I would want to keep my shutter speed up to get as sharp a shot as possible (there would be plenty of light) I set my camera to shutter-priority (I’m usually and aperture-priority guy) and made sure my shutter speed was at least as fast as one over my focal length (340mm in the case of my longest zoom on this combo). I also changed my focusing mode to continuous 3D tracking. This would be a moving target. I threw my rig in the car and headed out to the store, by way of Home Depot.
It only takes about five minutes to get there from my place – one exit south of me on the 405, I don’t even have to leave the exit ramp. I circled the parking lot and found an empty spot in the lot between a couple of trees. From my past experience I thought that I had a clear shot of the flight path, and I saw a small dot far on the horizon which, I figured, was a landing commercial airliner I could take a practice shot on. Knowing odds were against me that this would be the landing trajectory, I wasn’t too anticipatory, until, strangely enough, I found myself asking myself, what airline sported a medium blue and white paint scheme?
Holy crap!
My odds paid off. This was it. I threw off my sunglasses and lifted the camera. I had all of 8 seconds to fire off about 8 frames of the approaching aircraft. I was shaking when it was over, realizing how close this had come to one of those “damn I missed that shot!” occasions.
What did I learn today? Be prepared. If I hadn’t preset my camera for my expected circumstances, if even on a basic level, I would have been where I left off yesterday, shooting in manual, low ISO, and single point focus with a wide-angle lens. My shots turned out good, not great. I stll was in low ISO (100). Not a problem for light, but a higher ISO would have forced my aperture a bit smaller, putting it in a sharper range for that lens. My images are a little soft. I also had a little more noise than I would have liked. My camera peaks its signal to noise at ISO 200. I might have had better results there. I also would have liked to be in high-speed continuous shooting mode, but that’s not really that big of a deal, this camera fires really fast in single shot anyway.
But overall, if I had just grabbed my bag and gone I would have arrived with a 10-20mm lens on my D300 in manual mode and single point autofocus. Not realizing the plane approaching as I pulled up was the one, I would have had to get out my teleconverter and long zoom, swap gear and setup my camera. By that time it would have been long gone. In this case it really helped to think a minute and prepare, even before I left the house.
Oh, and as an aside, this plane was a little earlier than I expected. I guess there’s no way I’ll know if this was really Air Force One or the backup (they always fly two, only the one with the President on board is referred to as Air Force One) but I like to think that Obama was inside. Besides, I doubt that President Obama has to worry too much about his plane being late.
