Osh, better known as EAA AirVenture Oshkosh has begun with aircraft flying in as I type. It’s just simply the greatest event on so many levels! For the photographer wanting unfettered access to aircraft you’d otherwise never get close to, this is the place! The secret, gotta chase the light and not the aircraft. Osh works on the honor system and it works pretty darn well, you just gotta show up cause there are no barricades or ropes keeping you away. Sunrise is really darn early, 05:31 which is good and bad. It’s good cause only crazy photographers are out in the field at 04:45 (which is a handful at best) to catch the light. It’s bad cause sunset is 20:38 and by the time you ingest and go through the images from the day before, being up at 04:00 to catch that light comes real fast (nothing better than an afternoon nap under the wing of a plane)!
Jake, Brent & I like to hit the flight line light, no tripods or long lenses. One body and a lens like the Z24-120 & Z14-24f2.8 is how I would go now. Then, we normally would head to the one or two aircraft that morning we want to focus in on. There are waaaaaay too many to do them all in one morning so we pick the one or two and thoroughly work the opportunities. This include pinching that sun like you see here with “Devil Dog”, laying down and shooting up, group shots and silhouettes. Once the light gets hard, we head to the food tent at Warbird Alley, have coffee, coffee and then some breakie. Then it’s back to car to outfit for the rest of the day’s shooting. The next morning, we do it all again with another one or two aircraft, doing that all week. There’s nothing like it and it makes the flight back home at the end of the week real fast as we’re asleep the whole time.
Need more ideas or want to brush up on tactic and techniques, remember I have a Airshow Class online just for that reason. Blue Skies!