A near miss

1/2500th sec, f8, 400ISO, 80-200mm lens @ 135mm, Canon 350D

Our weekend of freebies continued today with an outing to a club airshow. What made it really good was that it isn't an advertised show, but rather a get together of all the club members. The only way to know it is on is by word of mouth. Consequently there weren't many people there which made it enjoyable and the access to the aeroplanes was virtually unlimited. There was a charge to get in, but a friend of ours was one of the organisers so we got in for nothing.

Before I go on I had better explain the blip for today. Of course I took lots of photos of planes but this one plane caught my eye. Appropriately named Big Bird. It is very impressive, by far the biggest biplane I have ever seen and looks like it can take around 10 passengers. Yes, people used to pay money to fly in it!!

Anyway it warmed up for ages and when it took off it backfired massively, spluttered and straight away appeared to be in difficulty. It wasn't gaining altitude and continued to backfire, giving off big puffs of smoke. Of course at that moment my flashcard decided to run out so I madly fumbled in my bag to get another. A friend of mine said," Get your camera out Martin, he's going down." By the time I got my new card loaded the plane had done a very low turn and was actually heading straight back towards us. Not the direction I wanted him to be heading! He managed to get himself over the runway though, and landed the plane safely. Thank goodness. It was quite exciting to watch. The plane was in the air for no more than a minute.

It has been one of those days when I had numerous images to use for my blip and it has taken me ages to choose. I decided to use this instead of some close ups and detail shots because even before the plane had a near miss, it really caught my eye. Some of the chosen few went to my flickr page.

My ISP has downgraded me to a 28Kb modem speed for exceeding my upload/download limit for the month. I wouldn't mind so much but I am paying top dollar. I should have unlimited and I think it's time to shop around for a better deal. It has taken me hours to upload the images I took today to flickr. Grrrrr!