March Madness

After a hellish busy week at the office, I find a package arrive for me at home today. Finally my new airbrush turned up weeks after ordering it. Ordered off Ali Express so the time factor was expected, for the whopping cost of $50, about a 1/6th of the price of buying in here locally.  So I now have a dual airbrush setup, so the weekend is looking like a painting mission for sure.

Game wise, the plan is for more Hail Caesar in the coming weeks as I try and finish off some more Greeks, and the local supplier had a sale, so of course I caved in and started another army. I've always want to do a full on Knight army. So I purchased a bunch of boxes (on sale) from Fire Forge. The Teutonic Knights. I'm trying to keep them in there boxes until I complete my Greeks. Which is a seriously challenge. So far I've almost finished one more unit of Greeks.

I've also now got the L'Art De La Guerre rules to read through as a replacement for our 15mm FOG gaming. This might be on the back burner for awhile.

Also on the photography side of things I managed to get my camera fixed after a bit of a disaster. And I've still got 3000 odd photos to sort through from a few weeks back when I went to the 80th Anniversary Air Tattoo for the New Zealand Air Force. I have put together two videos from the trip so far, which I'm rather pleased with.

Shutter Bug

So I haven't posted anything in awhile,which isn't surprising since I've been a bit of a shutter bug of late, with my photography taking over my gaming. Having just gotten back from the Omaka Classic Fighters Air Show I'm sifting through the 12,000 odd photos I shot. Yep an insane amount of shots, but actually rather easy to do with the camera gear I have.

So far I've sorted out the ground theatre and the Omaka Heritage Centre shots. Which I've posted up on my photography web site.  http://www.robertwood.co.nz/  Here's just a few I picked out.

The explosion is whats left of a V-1 bomb.

The saddest thing was having the FW190 crash on landing.Apparently one of the wheel breaks failed on landing and caused the plane to be thrown into a loop on the ground with caused the landing gear to fail and the plane hit the dirt. Thankfully the pilot was ok and no one got hurt.

Lots more photos to come in the next few days.

NZ Warbirds at Ardmore.

On Sunday I meet Will and Mark G. at Ardmore for the Warbirds Air show. Will was wanting to get some practice in with his new Canon 7D MrkII and Mark G. had picked up a new Nikon camera body as well (cant recall what it was, I'm not a Nikon guy) and I wanted to get some practice in with my new lens that I had unexpectedly acquired.

Now I've been saving for quite some time for a new lens, a rather expensive bit of kit. One just happened to come up on sale, second hand... practically new with 7 months on a 12 month warranty to go. I couldn't pass it up. So I'm rather broke, but extremely happy... early Christmas for me.

So I played around all day testing out the new lens, and what a lens it is... Awesome.

Canon 200-400 F4 with 1.4x Converter ...Big , Heavy and Awesome

Here's a bunch of shots, unedited apart from my logo.

Ardmore D-Day 70th Anniversary

So on Sunday the boys went out as usual to Ardmore to see the air show. It turned out to be a fantastically fine day. But for photography it was a pretty hard day to shoot. the hard lighting conditions made for sharp shadows and bright highlights.
I knew it would be difficult, so I spent a lot of time messing around with my camera settings and trying out new things…. the result was 3500 shots… most of which are ordinary to poor. Some good ones, but I’ve managed to get better ones over the past few years. So photography it wasn't that much of a success, but it’s always fun to see the birds in the sky and for $15 entry for a days entertainment, you cant go wrong.

So I’ve been playing around with adjusting some of the shots, trying not to do to much and cook the photos with too many adjustments. This is the sort of comparison of what I've changed, so not a lot.

Basically I enjoy being out shooting, and don't really enjoy playing with photos..guess that comes from being old school. Yes I know what  Film is, and I use to developed my own and print my own shots way back in time ..“shoot it in the can” as they use to say.

Something a little different was a large group of bikers going flat tack down the runway, they sure looked like they were enjoying the ride ... no speed limits.