Warbird Information Exchange

Here's the pics I got. A bit varied, got a good picture of Karen (good to get to say hi for once!) in her flight and had a lot of fun overall.

First up, one of our pilots (Russ Coonley) stands in the doorway during a lull in the traffic of attendees touring the R4D.


Next, a few pictures of Cavanaugh's EA-1E/AD-5 Skyraider. The third pic is a bit overexposed, but I couldn't get the prop to blur enough otherwise.




Here's my photos of Karen and the O-2, including the always requisite picture of the Armament of the day.




Some of the various attendees -

VANS, 2x CJ-6A (Cold War Air Museum), and a Cessna


UH-18, VANS, 2x Texan, XNQ


Detail shots of some of the attendees -

Carl Best's T-6G


Flight of the Phoenix SAAF Texan


Fairchild XNQ (more information here) Registration is N5726.


AN-2 (our friends in Mayperl)


Cavanaugh's EA-1E


After returning (around 6pm actually) we saw a couple of thunderstorm cells that had earlier moved through Dallas behind the R4D and I decided to take a couple of pictures.



Sorry about the "shading" at the top of the pictures. It's an issue that Kodak claims isn't the camera, but no matter what light I shoot in, I get them. If anyone has an idea of how to prevent them, I'm definitely open to suggestions. I use a Kodak Z612.

Great pics. Nice to see that old Fairchild still up and around.

The vignetting problem on your camera, especially in the upper left corner, is characteristic of this model. You can find mention of it in these reviews/forum threads:

http://www.photoxels.com/kodak-z612-image-quality.html

http://digital-photography-school.com/f ... php?t=2453

http://www.stevesforums.com/forums/view ... orum_id=18

I'm sure the extent of vignetting varies from unit to unit. Yours appears to be somewhat worse than most. The variation indicates not-great quality control, but the basic issue is that decent/consistent image quality throughout an extreme 12:1 zoom range is really asking too much of the lens. I have a Sony with specs like yours and although my problem is not so much vignetting as chromatic aberration (which I see on some of your pics as well, though mine is worse), overall I've just come to live with the fact that all of these megazooms are poor performers. My only tip would be to stay away from the very short end of the zoom range; you can see that your zoomed-in shots have much less vignetting or none at all. For your existing photos, there is a Photoshop plug-in called Vignette that corrects this type of thing, or you can just use a clone brush to paint it out, since it usually occurs in a fairly uniform sky area.

August

Thanks for the suggestions. I only use GIMP, but I'm sure they have a similar plug-in available. As for the chromatic aberration, a lot of that in mine is due to post-photo manipulation trying to clean it up and letting Photobucket shrink the image for me for the purpose of internet posting. The raw images are much better. I don't have money for a SLR right now, but hopefully I'll be able to get one here when the prices become a bit more into my price range.

Thanks for the photos, especially the XNQ. The last time I saw it was at the Bartlesville Fly-in in 2004 or so.

Thanks for posting pics....and good to see you. That Fairchild was most interesting

Re: our friends from Maypearl (AN-2).......did you see the baby birds they brought with them. There is a nest in the top wing and they stick their little heads out a hole (that's sposed to be there...LOL) and cheeeeeeeeeeeeepppppp at you. Amazing

I didn't see them, but I heard them. It is one of those things that not only makes those guys fun to hang out with (talk about RedNeck... ), but it lends yet more credence to the idea that the AN-2 is more of a farm tool than an airplane.