Just another typical aussie autumn day, ball freezing temperatures followed by sunshine followed by rain followed by spectacular sunset colours… and somewhere in between some flying pressed bits of aluminum.

Its a been a few years since I saw Wings over Illawarra Airshow, this year i was keen since the weather forecast was for some minor rain and cloud, which I found particularly appealing. Whilst most would like airshows to be under complete blue skies, they can get a bit boring from the photographic perspective, hence some cloud action can certainly help mix it up a bit.
I caught the train down to Albion park, best $2.60 ever, slept most of the way 🙂 then got off the train and walked 100 metres to the airshow, hat pretty cool i reckon, there are no other airshows in Oz with a hopes chance of having public transport like that.
In terms of bang for your buck, Wings over Illawarra (WOI) is pretty well at the top, probably only second to Temora. They did not have any FA/18’s but to be honest they are bit ho hum nowadays 🙂 no JSF you say?…. really.. that thing would burn the money outta everyones pockets as it flew past 😉

A few notes, and these are really to remind me in 12 months time when I go to another airshow. 1) using a lens with vibration isolation on it really really helps. When you have to shoot at shutter speeds of 1/160s to get some nice motion blur behind the aircraft and also on the props the VR really helps, the majority of my better shots were taken with the 70-200mm f2.8 with the 1.7 TC. The reach was short, but the VR made up for it. 2) The shutter speed needs to be 1/100 or 1/160 to really get some nice motion blur on the propeller and background, without it, the image looks static and frozen.

There are alot of images here:) strike rate was 2 in 5 for the panning images.

There are even a few sneaky landscape hot in here too…