Wellington anniversary day

Posted on January 30, 2009 by zkarj

A small selection of photos taken on Wellington anniversary day – a less common day of the week for me to visit Wellington airport (being a Monday).

First, a pair of shots of RNZAF Boeing 757 NZ7571 taxying for RWY16, showing the versatility of my new lens. The two shots are at 230mm and 62.5mm respectively, well inside the 55-300mm range available. Both shots are slightly cropped from the as-shot frame but by similar amounts.

An interesting and slightly rare general aviation type is this Cessna 185, seen tucked in a corner by Wellington Aero Club (making the lighting a bit of a pain).

Air New Zealand (and former Freedom Air) Boeing 737 ZK-SJE was apparently in need of an urgent bit of attention. This is the same (Air National) hangar that the recently afflicted ATR-72 was nosed into following its post take-off mishap.

Finally, something that may have been so for a while, but it was the first time I had noted it. One of Wellington Flight Centre‘s aircraft has an interesting name. I’ve heard of a beached whale, but a “Beech kipper”?

Wings over Wairarapa 2009

Posted on January 18, 2009 by zkarj

Yes, it’s air show season again and Wings over Wairarapa 2009 has kicked off the year in, well, very average style.

On the whole, it was worth spending the day in the moderate heat and wind, but it wasn’t as exciting as promised. The star attraction – Doug Brooker’s Spitfire – was of course absent after its unfortunate mishap on Thursday. The RNZAF failed to bring anything larger than a King Air (which was hidden away until after the show!), and many of the more delicate WWI-era aircraft were not taken aloft due to the blustery winds.

Anyway, here is a small selection of what did make an appearance. There is a Wings over Wairarapa 2009 set on my Flickr site which contains 159 of the 586 photos taken on the day. The good news is my new lens and new memory cards performed brilliantly.

First up, perhaps the most spectacular sight of the day was an 8-ship formation of Yak-52s which kicked off their involvement with a “pylon race”. Very entertaining.

There were, as usual, a few agricultural aircraft displaying including the only remaining Tiger Moth top dresser, Wanganui Aero Work’s ZK-AUZ.

Only three of the WWI-vintage aircraft got airborne on the day, including this Pfalz D.III

WWII warbirds were well represented with two P-40 Kittyhawks, a P-51 Mustang and, my favourite, the FG-1D Corsair

The RNZAF showed up with their best-ever selection of 7 helicopters – a Kaman SH-2G Seasprite, pictured here, four UH-1H Iroquois and two Bell 47G Sioux. By the next WoW, two of those types will be undergoing replacement.

And, of course, the Red Checkers were on hand. I’ve never been to an air show where they weren’t present.

And finally, after deciding to hang around for a bit after the show instead of rushing to join queues of traffic, we witnessed a mini-airshow with a very interesting selection of aircraft that had either been purely on static display or owners had simply flown in. They included this DeHavilland DHC-2 Beaver.

Heaven. I’m in heaven…

Posted on January 12, 2009 by zkarj

…And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek,
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.

So sang Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers in the 1935 movie Top Hat. He was singing to, and about, Ginger and not about his Pentax digital SLR camera. However these words come close to describing my relationship with my camera right now.

My Sigma 100-300mm f4.5-6.7UC lens has served me well over the years, beginning its tour of duty on my 35mm Pentax MZ-50 in 1998 then transitioning to my first DSLR, a Pentax *ist DS, and finally my Pentax K10D. However, mated with the K10D I was very aware of image quality issues when ‘pixel-peeping’. There was considerable noise, even at low ISO values, and a very soft focus. My Flickr photostream is testament to the good images that could be wrung from this lens if scaled down to approximately half size.

The 10 megapixels of the K10D translate to image dimensions of 3872 x 2592 pixels and I only publish to Flickr at a ‘full’ size of 1600 x 1071 pixels – about 41% of original size. This down-sizing is enough to hide almost all of the noise and most of the soft-focus issue. I sought online opinion on whether this quality was to be expected given my equipment and the universal response was that the lens was letting down the more than capable camera.

Well, I have just reached a milestone year of my life – the big four oh. For such occasion my parents bestowed on me my choice of expensive gift. What I chose was a brand new (and not long released) Pentax DA55-300mm f4-5.8ED zoom lens, which has now become the perfect partner for my K10D.

After some back yard comparisons, which looked promising, I took the new combo out to Wellington Airport on Sunday and clicked away pretty much as I usually do – i.e. making the same mistakes most likely. The zoom ring felt just right as I took advantage of the 55mm wide end of the range to fit in whole aircraft where before I had to make do with “detail” shots, up close with the 100mm minimum.

Upon returning home and viewing the results I can declare that the DA55-300 is a touch of glass! The results are, to me at least, astonishing. Others have remarked the same too.

So enough rambling – what about the photos!? I’ve posted 15 to my Flickr account and have chosen 4 to grace this blog post. Two of the images below are also viewable in their full glory by clicking the ‘full resolution‘ link below the picture. You may have to force your browser to show the image at actual size as many will scale it to fit your browser window. Trust me when I say you do not have a screen big enough to fit the whole photo, so if you can see it all, it’s been shrunk.

Note that the full resolution images are high quality JPEG files converted directly from the unprocessed RAW images from the camera. I.e. the images are stright out of camera looking that good!

First another view of Wellington-based Cirrus SR22 ZK-YUG. Yes, it was rather overcast!

Full resolution