Wings Over Houston

The struggle is real. I'm starting to notice a trend in my posts and that's they're being delayed longer than I want them to. I'm going to work on fixing this because my last post was a week late and this one is three weeks late. The whole point of this blog is to get out there and take more photos and share them on a regular basis. This will help by forcing me to practice more with my photography, writing, and maintaining deadlines for my work and yea..isn't happening the way it should. Again everything on this site is a work in progress and that's the name of the game, progress. Anyway, onto the main post.

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Wings Over Houston is an annual airshow held in October (17th weekend this year) with a variety of different planes and shows backed by different organizations. One of the organizations that deserves a lot of credit is the Lone Star Flight Museum in Galveston, TX. Lone Star is recognized as the Texas avaition Hall of Fame and specializes in informing the public about, along with restoring and preserving warbirds. The link below will take you to their website where you can learn more information about them and what they do.
http://www.lsfm.org/
I didn't get as early of a start that day as I would have liked, but I had to meet up with an insurance agent to inspect my Jeep for a claim that morning. Fortunately it didn't take long and I was down at Ellington Airfield before things really started kicking off. I had my camera out before I even walked through the gate and started taking some photos, but I really came down for the warbirds and the synchronized flying teams. After warming up with some early photos I went off to find Moose and his wife Sharon Peterson.
Moose is a professional photographer whose work I follow closely. He focuses mainly on wildlife, landscape, and aviation photography. The Petersons fly in from Mammoth Lakes California every year for Wings Over Houston in support of the Lone Star Museum. I was able to meet up with them and talk for a bit between their responsibilities to working the event. When the warbirds started flying we met up again and started shooting as a group, along with some other photographers.
​http://www.moosepeterson.com/blog/

It was interesting shooting in a group since I'm almost always by myself. Every time a plane came by for a photo pass someone would call out a direction and we would ready up and start shooting. We all had our constant high-speed shutters going off so that was interesting to hear that all around me on each pass. All of the other photographers had better equipment than I did, but I didn't do too bad.It takes a lot of skill to pan that fast and I don't have any experience photographing planes in flight so I was suprised how well some turned out. I will say that I shot a little over 1600 photos, only about 115 or so I would consider decent, and about half of that to be "good."

Panning is definitely a skill I need to develop judging from the photos I took not being as sharp as a I want them do be due to motion blur. Even the ones that were pretty sharp (not that many) weren't up to par without some editing. I'm not sure if this is the limitations of my equipment of lack of knowledge on my part to take sharper photos, but that's something I will have to research more. I've noticed now that I'm spending more time editing now that my photos are never quite as sharp as other photographers work that I follow, so again more research needed on my part.
Well that's it for this post, until next time.

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