Battle of Britain Commemorations

On Sunday, the Warbirds Association planned a little flypast over the Auckland War Memorial Cenotaph for the Battle of Britain Commemorations.

Lee, Mark G and I headed into Ardmore to watch the Warbirds depart.

We were keeping our fingers crossed weather wise, as I think it was pretty touch and go on the aircraft flying!

The outing gave me another good chance to try out my new 70 - 200mm lens :-)

Reflections

Preparations

Scramble!!

Take Off!

A Safe Return

Horsepower

Plenty of amateur photographers getting in the way though.... :-)

And someone trying to look very small after getting dirty looks from a Spitfire pilot who nearly ran him over....

Thanks for lunch Mark :-)

To end, what it was all about - remembering The Few.

Thanks for having a look. Always happy for feedback and thoughts :-)

Trying something a bit different

I've been playing around with a few images in Photoshop through following a few tutorials.

Mainly to try and get my head around using Photoshop a little more.... as there's so many options, it's hard to know where to start! So I tend to either get lost or give up and just stick to basic adjustments in Lightroom.

Still, I'm slowly getting there and the working through the tutorials is helping :-)

Here's one I worked on the other day. Aim was to convert the image to a sketch.

Here's the original image -

And the image after a bit of Photoshop magic to turn it into a sketch -

Am pretty happy with the result. Layers are starting to make a little bit of sense now! :-)

As always, happy for any thoughts or feedback.

Western Springs

Spring is definitely in the air and after a few miserable days, Saturday actually turned out to be a pretty nice day.

Time to get some sun!

Mark G and I had talked earlier in the week about heading out for a photo shoot since I had just purchased a new toy.... a Canon EF 70 - 200mm f/2.8 L IS II :-)

To try it out, we settled on Western Springs. Rob had been out there prior to his holiday and had picked up some nice shots of the bird life around the lake. It seemed a convenient place for us to head along too for a bit of practice.

I was looking forward to trying my new lens... so much bokehlicious goodness! :-)

Chip wars! This gull was quite happy to take on a much larger Goose for a chip...

Too slow Gull!!

Can any of you gentlemen relate to this one....

Mark's new friend.... only got hissed at a few times...

The heavy rain had really muddied the water up.

This poor Swan was either a sucker for punishment or a slow learner....

These two are heavily cropped. Pretty happy with how they turned out. Could be a little sharper, but I need to do a lot more practice / trials with the AF & tracking settings.

 I can fly!

I don't know what it is with Eels & Catfish, but people seemed fascinated by them. There was a lot of people feeding them which mean they were coming up quite close to the surface... Something a little different to grab some shots off :-)

It's a trap!

After a break for lunch it was time to crack out the new 1.4x Extender to see what that was like.

First stop, some of the local yoof's deciding it would be a great idea to stick their hands in the water. That mess of stuff they're playing with is a giant mass of Eels. I started snapping of a few photos whilst waiting for one of them to fall in. I was to be disappointed.

Back to the birds with the extender on.... where we spotted this guy... what was he up too?

Oh, lunch is served...

Unfortunately I was too slow to get a couple of shots where the poor eel was literally just inhaled by the Shag.

The Shag's seemed to be doing loops around the lake. So managed to grab some in flight shots. Again, not really as sharp as I would like. More practice with tracking required.

A good day out and I'm pretty happy with my new toy. The AF picked up my targets very quickly especially with a couple of the shots being snapped off pretty quick.

We'll have to get Rob to invite us over to dinner again (aka a trip out to the Gannet colony at Muriwai) for some more practice.

Thanks for having a look.