A Night at the Airport

moose135

I was out on the ramp at Republic Airport a few nights ago, shooting an airliner that was in for a sports charter. There is company that flies folks down to the Atlantic City casinos, and one of their aircraft arrived after the last flight of the night. After dropping the passengers at the terminal, they came back to park near where I was shooting. I've always wanted to try a shot like this, and had about 20 seconds to figure out how to shoot it. All in all, I'm pleased with how it turned out.

black mamba

I'd say you did a great job on figuring out your settings. This shot is very appealing.

Tom

Jack'll do

Great shot indeed. Love the blinking red lights.

TA-2D

Love this photo i agree the red lights pretty neat

Skippy

moose135 wrote:

I was out on the ramp at Republic Airport a few nights ago, shooting an airliner that was in for a sports charter. There is company that flies folks down to the Atlantic City casinos, and one of their aircraft arrived after the last flight of the night. After dropping the passengers at the terminal, they came back to park near where I was shooting. I've always wanted to try a shot like this, and had about 20 seconds to figure out how to shoot it. All in all, I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Moose, the trail lights make this shot
Look at those trails, hardly got a shake in them, almost perfectly straight!

Man and you even got stars all the way too :ivar smarty pants
Great Shot! ..... Skippy
.

NomadRip

Turned out great, I think!

DaddyO

Well done. Very nice photo. You even got some prop blur along with
the cool star patterns from the lights.

Care to reveal your camera settings? Love to try this.

moose135

Thanks folks, I really appreciate the kind words. How did I get this shot? As I mentioned, after he dropped his passengers at the terminal, he came over to our side of the airfield to park for the night. I asked the ground crewman / marshaller where he was going to have them stop the aircraft. Knowing that, I set up the tripod to capture that area, as well as the last part of his taxi path up the ramp. I was shooting at ISO 100, f/11, and a 30 second exposure, manually focused on the area he was going to stop at. When he entered the frame, I tripped the shutter, and ended up with the light streaks, and about 10 - 15 seconds of him stopped prior to engine shutdown before the shutter closed again.

If I could have coordinated with the pilots beforehand, I might have popped a flash a couple of times to better fill in the (dark blue) bottom of the aircraft, but I would not do that without their expecting it, and I like the effect I ended up with.

Skippy, the variations in the light trails were caused by small irregularities in the smoothness of the ramp surface.

Again, Thanks!