We’ve spent the past year remodeling an old adobe home in the historic Fort Lowell district of Tucson.  The result is a charming studio and workplace, a perfect venue to display changing galleries of images.  The first exhibit now adorns the walls, taking advantage of a unique display option marketed by a company called fotoflôt.  And we’ve polished up our online gallery of fine art images to reflect this newest stage of our photographic progress.

A couple of weeks ago while vacationing in New Zealand, we stopped off at Wings Over Wairarapa, Australasia’s largest air show taking place that weekend right on our route to Wellington. The weather forecast was for rain and we thought it quite likely the air show would be canceled or curtailed – but although we drove through drizzle and mist on the way down, it cleared by the time we reached Wairarapa.

Some 45,000 spectators attended over Saturday and Sunday, and the air show was terrific! On display and in the air were some of the finest privately owned collections of First & Second World War aircraft in the world. Although there was a strong emphasis on the historical airplanes, New Zealand’s armed forces had an impressive showing of their jets and helicopters. The action was non-stop as a variety of aircraft, from WWI triplanes to modern day jets, followed each other into the sky, while spectators camped out on grassy fields by the runway overlooking a scenic rural landscape.

I brought a lot of camera gear on the trip, but my new 200-400 zoom needs a suitcase unto itself, so it stayed home.  Instead I put my 70-200VR on my D3, added an old 2.0 teleconverter, cranked the shutter speed up to 1/1000 second, and fired off nearly 1,000 shots (in motor-drive) filling up two 8 gigabyte cards and getting some fun action shots as a result.  Today I read on Moose Peterson’s blog that if I had slowed down to 1/250 second I could have captured the blur of the prop in motion.  Next time!

Wairarapa Air Show Gallery

Christmas Amaryllis Gallery