OK, I’ve looked at them but I’m not sure what your point is.

In the majority the aircraft is sharp and the trees have a certain amount of blur on them. But to me this looks more like movement, not focus.

I’m sure there is something wrong with my theory – I’m no photographer – But I still hold that over that distance, if the lens focus was locked on infinity and a shot taken of an aircraft stopped on the runway (to avoid the need to pan and so eliminating movement blur) both the aircraft and the trees would be in focus.

Moggy

Have a look at the Low Level Wales – 30 July thread on the air shows sub-forum, and then go down to the A10 and Hercules pictures. There doesn’t seem to be much obvious motion blur to them, but the mountains in the background are certainly not sharp.
EXIF info says the A10 was taken with the lens at 400mm and f/9, and a shutter speed of 1/800 sec. The Hercules is 165mm, f/9 and 1/250 sec.

Could it just be a question of lack of a suitable application in the first half of the 60s to make the exercise worthwhile? Conway-engined 707s and DC-8s hardly sold like hot cakes, and BSE had enough on their plate with the vectored thrust Pegasus and the various Olympuses anyway.
I presume RR must also have pondered the idea, but its ten-tonne fan studies eventually went into the V2500 a few years later.
Anyone else know better?

BBC now saying it’s RAF, with 12 hurt but nobody killed. Fingers crossed, let’s hope it stays that way.

I’m following this one with interest, as I’ve got an S9600 and there’s a slight softness about many of the shots straight out of the camera.
At a purely subjective level, the pictures from my 2800Z have a crispness to them which is lacking from those of the newer camera.
I’ve heard suggestions that this is a known issue with the S9500, but not its successor. I’ll see if I can dig up any examples.

William

To me it shows the difference between now and then

Stuart Gowans is exactly right. No-one would have taken offence then, but times have changed and a great many perfectly resonable people would be upset now.
After all, all the effing and blinding that would surely have been part of the crew conversation in any aircraft in the thick of combat has been excised from the Dam Busters and its contemporary war films. Any war film, indeed, is to some degree a bowdlerisation of what it was really like, even the more graphic recent offerings like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down.
If aviation cinephiles want to take a stand on nigger, then it will alas, send out quite the wrong message about them to the public at large. It would have the retrospective effect of making Gibson and the 617 crews racists in the mind of many viewers, which I am sure they were not.
BTW I’m sure I’ve heard a Dam Busters version when it’s edited to Trigger. Can anyone confirm?

William

I reckon a far better candidate to be a “British B-29” would have been the unbuilt Short S36 for the B8/41 spec, essentially a stretched “super-Stirling” with four Centauruses (Centauri??) Almost B-29 sized, but unpressurised and a lesser payload.

William

The Bristol Hydra was a 16-cylinder radial, ie two rows of eight. Never saw production, but I’m pretty sure there’s a survivor at Filton – can anyone confirm?

William