Duxford Visit – 05Aug10

The Sea King is now part of the Air and Sea Display in Hangar 3 and its place in the spray bay in Hangar 5 has been taken by the Typhoon. It could be in residence for some time as during the afternoon the Shackleton and Victor were repositioned, with the aid of a big yellow tug, to fill the spare space left in the ‘Corporate Hospitality Suite’ part of AirSpace. ARCo were playing musical aeroplanes with their inmates from the north side of Hangar 2. They had extracted the North American Yale and it was towed to the ARCo compound and given an engine run. Earlier on the twin engined Beech 18 had its engines given a smokey spin. I had thought the HAC Nimrod would go flying as it and the Hucks Starter were out on the airfield, but after an initial engine run, the starter decided to throw a wobbly for the second start and would not co-operate. It had to be pushed back to the hangar. Six Tutors dropped in for a visit and an Apache spent about an hour for a bit of landing and take off practice.

Having used the in-camera HDR feature for my RAFM Hendon visit, I thought I’d experiment and try exposure bracketing this time. These five images were taken using three bracketed photos with an exposure bias of 0EV/-0.7EV/+0.7EV so the detail is preserved in both the highlights and shadows and processed in Photoshop Elements 8 using the Photomerge Exposure tool. Basically pseudo HDR but without the weird and psychedelic colours. One thing I did find out was that as my camera doesn’t have a mirror lock, I need to use my heavy duty tripod instead of my lightweight travel one next time, as quite a few of the images when stacked didn’t quite line up due to camera shake.

Brian