Alice in Wonderland at the Swiss Garden - Many Strange Encounters

They were holding an Alice in Wonderland picnic in the Swiss Gardens at Shuttleworth with lots of strange animals to encounter. The Peacocks had a hard day both displaying to the plastic flamingo and being chased by the children - especially my granddaughter. I retired from the noise to the lakeside walk where there were further strange encounters including Scorpions flies, a Fold-Winged Cranefly (Ptychoptera contaminata) a new Shieldbug for me (Crucifer Shieldbug Eurydema oleracea) and a Long-Jawed Spider

Shuttleworth Air Show - Vulcan's Last Public Appearance

Perfect weather for the Airshow at Shuttleworth to enjoy the varied older aircraft of their collection, the acrobatics of Mark Jeffries and the last public viewing of the Vulcan. I liked the first glimpse of the Vulcan accompanied by an Avro Anson and then the crowd's reaction on its first flypass. Taken with the Fuji XT1 - can anyone explain why all the propellers are curved in the photos on this camera?

Shuttleworth Evening Flying

The light in the first part of the evening was ideal - low sunlight with plenty of interesting clouds as well as blue patches. The clouds built up in the second half and it started to rain just as the show finished at 7 oclock. After last year's trials, I settled on a 640th of a second which gave a chance of sharp images but with some movement in the propeller.

Experiments in Shutterspeed.

We spent yesterday afternoon and evening at the Shuttleworth Collection, photographing birds of prey in the afternoon and then switching to veteran airplanes in the evening. I experimented with different shutterspeeds for the photographs and it has reinforced my puzzlement as to why we have such rigid and different conventions for the two subjects.

With birds in flight, it is generally thought that the shutterspeed should be such that all motion is stopped and everything is sharp. Hence in the first Kite picture, 1/1000sec is too slow for the wing tip motion. The second kite image at 1/1600 is sharp throughout as is the Saker Falcon at 1/1250.

With airplanes (and cars etc), the opposite holds in that there should be some motion in the propeller (or wheels). Hence the image taken at 1/1000sec although very sharp isnot acceptable as the prop motion has been frozen. I tried at both 1/250 and 1/400 but found that, as I was using my camera on a tripod, I didn't manage to follow through sufficiently well with the panning so ended up images that were not sharp. My best images were a compromise at 1/800 sec