What do you do on hot noon when the easterly wind is blowing a gale and the only smart place to be is under the air conditioner with a cold drink and a book? Why you drive to Jandakot airport and look at the student pilots having their lunch, of course. And note that the amateurs are smart enough not be trying to fly but the professionals are not so wise. Or so lucky.
Jandakot is a bet - sometimes good and sometimes bad. It is accessed through one road that has a number of roundabouts and feeders that can clog up dramatically. Getting to work or to home after work must be a nightmare for the aviators. The lucky ones with helicopters and parachutes can hover over their house and jump, but the rest would be stuck in traffic for hours.
The trial run today was either a brilliant flop or a miserable success - in either case I am indebted to the RFDS ( Another dollar in their tin at collection time. ) because they were not going to let murderous winds keep them from doing their duty.
My idea was to test out the IBIS or OIS system that the Fujifilm X-H1 sports. With no lens longer than 135mm I needed some close encounters of the aviation kind. A more interesting test would have been a longer lens or a lens that had no OIS system in-built. We're talking retro lens or vintage lens here - the sort of thing that one hasn't picked out of the closet for years. Now that there are adapters for everything, and the Fujifilm X-H1 has an interior stabilisation mechanism, there should be a lot of experimentation possible.
I probably did it wrong. I arrived just as the RFDS were about to come and go and didn't plan my settings all that well. I did drop the ISOto the baseline and gave the lens its head as far as the aperture went. Then I dialled the thing down to 1/30th of a second for a number of shot to see if the combined effort of lens and body stabilisation would yield a sharp shot.
Yes and no, but when it was no, it was definitely not.
When it was yes, I still was at the mercy of subject movement.
Panning was the answer, as it so often is.
And at the end I just whacked the shutter speed up to 1/250 of a second and had done with it.
I do admire the RFDS for getting such a good appearance of real propellers on their models - I try to do it with canned air sprays and clear plastic discs but it never seems as good. I suppose they have more money to buy the good propellers...
