Imperial War Museum, Duxford - 5th & 14th August 2010

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5th August:
The Sea King is now part of the Air and Sea Display in Hangar 3 and its place in the spray bay in Hangar 5 has been
taken by the Typhoon. It could be in residence for some time as during the afternoon the Shackleton and Victor were
repositioned, with the aid of a big yellow tug, to fill the spare space left in the 'Corporate Hospitality Suite' part of
AirSpace.
ARCo were playing musical aeroplanes with their inmates from the north side of Hangar 2. They had extracted the
North American Yale and it was towed to the ARCo compound and given an engine run. Earlier on the twin engined
Beech 18 had its engines given a smokey spin.
I had thought the HAC Nimrod would go flying as it and the Hucks Starter were out on the airfield, but after an initial
engine run, the starter decided to throw a wobbly for the second start and would not co-operate. It had to be pushed
back to the hangar. Six Tutors dropped in for a visit and an Apache spent about an hour for a bit of landing and take
off practice.

Having used the in-camera HDR feature for my RAFM Hendon visit, I thought I?d experiment and try exposure bracketing
this time. These five images were taken using three bracketed photos with an exposure bias of 0EV/-0.7EV/+0.7EV so the
detail is preserved in both the highlights and shadows and processed in Photoshop Elements 8 using the Photomerge
Exposure tool. Basically pseudo HDR but without the weird and psychedelic colours. One thing I did find out was that as
my camera doesn't have a mirror lock, I need to use my heavy duty tripod instead of my lightweight travel one next time,
as quite a few of the images when stacked didn't quite line up due to camera shake.

14th August
Been a while since I waved my camera around Duxford on the end of my mono pod. I have a slightly longer shutter
release cable now so a slightly higher reach. The place was quite busy and the car park was full by mid-day. There
were also aviation artists dotted around the various hangars recording their images to canvas although I still think a
camera is quicker. It was raining when I left home. Raining when I arrived at Duxford. Raining when I got back into
Cambridge and raining, with thunder, when I got home again so decided to give the Old Warden Evening show a miss.