A little bit of history

Finding a starting point is going to be difficult, but I've settled on this. My Flickr stream has an album which is auto-generated by Dopiaza. Each day each identifies the 100 'Most Interesting' images from my photo stream. How this is worked out by Flickr is a deeply-guarded secret, but it normally does a pretty decent job of identifying one's most popular shots. Searching through these 100 images for a suitable starting point is certainly easier than delving into the 5,348 that currently sit in my photostream.

Anyway, here's the image. It's the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight (RAF BBMF) Avro Lancaster Bomber (PA474)


(Canon 5D MkII, Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM @ 220mm, f/8.0, 1/40)

This aircraft remains one of only two Lancasters still airworthy today. The RAF BBMF do a great job of summarising the history of this aircraft on their pages.
Anyone who has followed my photostream on Flickr over the Years will know that I thoroughly enjoy taking (or attempting to take) interesting images of aircraft, but this one is one of my favourites. There's a couple of reasons for this.

Technically, I'm really pleased with it. I was reading an article once that discussed the merits of using unusually slow shutter speeds whilst shooting motorsport (another passion of mine, I'm sure it'll crop up again). This inspired me to try out the technique. Panning can be hard enough in itself, but using sub-100th/sec shutter speeds make it particularly tricky.
The article suggested using 1/60th second and below to create really dramatic images, but this only really works with aircraft if there is some background context, in this case, the ground. This particular shot was take at 1/40th second. The Lancaster had just landed following it's display, so was travelling relatively slowly and I fired off a number of shots in my steady-ish panning motion. This one was the only truly sharp result.

The B&W was added in Lightroom, as was the vignette. I'm no longer keen on the vignette - I'll re-cut it at some point to remove it. Why B&W? Well, it was a pretty drab day, and the sky was uninteresting. I think it's adds more than it takes away.

The extra special part for me, is that my Grandfather was in Bomber Command in World War 2. He was a flight engineer in Halifax Bombers and survived to tell the tale. Hero.

I took this at the annual Royal International Air Tattoo in 2013. It's a fantastic event which I really can't recommend enough.