Category Archives: Photography

We’d been planning this long overdue visit to Castle Combe circuit since the beginning of the year having missed it for the last two seasons. Fortunately the weather behaved itself and we had glorious sunshine for the majority of the day, and a bit of cloud cover later in the afternoon.

Today was their Sportscar raceday, so we were entertained with a plethora of cars from Ferrari, Porsche, Aston Martin, along with more mundane marques such as Nissan, Subaru, and Mitsubishi. We sat on the banking on the outside of Quarry Corner as normal which is usually a good place to see a crash or three, and we weren’t let down. Most were fairly innocuous, however one involved a rather nice Aston Martin which destroyed the tyre wall, the Armco behind it, and most of the car itself. This caused the race to be stopped, and the track closed for about 45 minutes so they could recover the driver and car, then rebuild the wall.

One of the races features a pair of BMWs which were superbly entertaining, on most laps they were taking Quarry sideways in perfect synchronisation.

The rest of the days racing was superb and passed without any major incidents.

More photos: Castle Combe Sportscar Raceday, August 2010

Yet again the weather forecast wasn’t ideal, and we didn’t make the final decision to attend until Saturday evening. On the day it was fairly overcast, and far from ideal conditions for taking photographs. I settled for photographing mainly planes I hadn’t seen before, but the resultant photos were all fairly uninspiring.

For the first time since I started attending the weather was good enough for the Edwardian planes to be retrieved from the hangar and “flown” at the end of the display. We had flights from a 1909 Bleirot XI, the oldest airworthy plane in the world, an 1910 Deperdussin, an 1912 Blackburn monoplane Type ‘D’, the oldest flying British aeroplane in the world, and two replicas, a 1910 Bristol Boxkite and a 1911 Avro Triplane. The latter two originally built for Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines.

Bristol Boxkite

Avro Triplane

More photos: Shuttleworth Military Air Pageant, August 2010

A dubious weather forecast during the week was nothing uncommon, however by the end of the week it was looking promising. We arrived a bit before 11 to find ourselves parked at the opposite end of the site to usual which made a nice change. It was lovely and sunny but a bit too windy, with gusts up towards 30 knots at times.

The weather held out for the start of the display, but clouded over after a while. However the sun made sporadic reappearances towards the end improving the conditions for photography as it did.

More photos: Shuttleworth American Air Display, July 2010

At the weekend I finally picked up an Olympus E-P1 camera with the 14-42 kit lens. I suspect Olympus are EOLing the camera at the moment as you can pick it up cheaper than the budget E-PL1 version. A play around over the weekend confirmed what I suspected, it’s a superb little camera. DSLR performance in a compact P&S sized body, the only downside is the slightly confusing menu system compared with my usual Canon bodies.

After a bit of internet shopping yesterday, a Panasonic 20mm f1.7 lens arrived today to go with the E-P1, in my mind a far more sensible choice than the 17mm f2.8 offering from Olympus. The fast lens combined with in-body IS going some way to compensate for the lack of flash.

Film Night

Now I need to find some time to give it a proper workout.

The weather forecast a few days beforehand promised heavy rain and thunder for most of the day, but nearer the time seemed to improve a bit. So having missed a trip up in May due to bad weather we decided to carry on regardless of the forecast. Arriving at Old Warden on the Sunday morning the area was blanketed with fog, making visibility somewhat minimal. As a consequence of this, and a few aircraft being a bit broken such as the Lancaster and the Dakota, the display list was reduced slightly.

After lunch the weather did improve somewhat, and the sun even made a brief appearance at times, however it wasn’t enough to allow any decent photography at any distance, so I resorted mainly to catching the planes on take-off or landing.

Towards the end dark clouds loomed and the light went completely. As the rain started to spot we packed up to walk back to the car only to be greeted by torrential rain. In the minute or two it took to walk/jog back we got absolutely drenched, and spent most of the 3 hour drive back steaming quietly in the back of the car. Despite that, we’ll no doubt be back again later in the year for another visit.

More photos: Shuttleworth D-Day Air Display, June 2010.