After a week of editing wedding and commercial images, I needed a bit of a break and fortunately, it came in the form of aircraft photography. I met up with a friend and headed down to Lincolnshire to take part in a nighttime shoot of an iconic World War II bomber – an Avro Lancaster ‘Just Jane’. The event was organised by Timeline Events and I’ve been to a couple of their offerings in the past, including a previous shoot of ‘Just Jane’ a couple of years ago. While I feel the organisers go to an effort to create some amazing scenes, this one was just too over subscribed and was a real bunfight. I’m guessing there must have been approaching 150 photographers crowed in a semi-cricle around the aricraft and it made for an uncomfortable shoot- during the first session, I was so tightly hemmed in I couldn’t even get my camera bag off my back to change lenes! This being the case, I ended up shooting the whole event with a 28-45mm lens on my medium format camera. This lens had been loaned to me by The Flash Centre in Leeds (I highly recommend these guys!) for me to simply try out and so that’s what I did. This is a state of the art lens designed for the Pentax 645Z medium format camera and rocks in at just shy of £5k! However, I have to say, it performed flawlessly and the results of this lens on the 50mp sensor of the Pentax 645z are remarkable. Would I go on another shoot like this? Depends really. There’s no doubt they are a great photo oppurtunity but I wish I could chat with them and suggest changes that would have made this shoot even better.
