First Red Bull Flugtag 2012 Singapore

This is the first Red Bull Flugtag ("flying day") in Singapore. Participants make crazy contraptions and attempt to glide them off a ramp into the sea.

This entry is from Singapore Polytechnic. Wings look weak to me. If you've seen video footage of the flights, you'll notice that most of the time the wings break off in flight. 

The glider is being pushed up the ramp to the launch point. Somehow, the scene reminds me of the Pacific Island Cargo Cults after World War II. 

This is right at the end of Siloso Beach, near the Rasa Sentosa hotel.

• Nikon D7000, 55-300mm f4.5-5.6
• At 116mm, f11, ISO 100, 1/1000 seconds
• Aperture priority, center-weighted metering, auto white balance
• Picasa: Crop, auto contrast, fill light

With a telephoto lens, default aperture is f8 or f11 for usable depth of field. Which means that you don't need a big, heavy and expensive f2.8 telephoto lens for outdoor use (that's an indoor lens). Today's "consumer" lenses are excellent performers, giving you quality optics at a low price. Don't you just love capitalism?

Telephoto applications is one area where the cropped sensor DSLRs have an advantage. On the D7000, a 300mm lens is equivalent to 450mm on a full frame camera.
 
Access is everything in photography. Without an access pass, I wandered around outside the barricaded security area and managed to find this unblocked view of the ramp. Couldn't get a good view of the launch point to photograph the actual flight. Much of the crowd was watching on large video screens instead. 

F15 Taking Off, RSAF Open Day, Paya Lebar Airbase

RSAF (Republic of Singapore Air Force) F15 taking off for the flight display. It looks fuzzy because of heat shimmer from another jet that just passed in front of it and is now out of the photo.

I stood back from the crowd, maybe 20, 50 meters, because I hate crowds. I thought heck, you want to see the planes in the sky anyway, so no point squeezing to see them on the runway. Luckily stumbled onto this shot because of that.

If you take a photo of the airplanes alone, it's pretty boring. You need to add people to make it come alive. If I were close to the crowd, I wouldn't be able to get the jet looking this large plus so many people in the crowd, into the same photo, because the perspective would be different.

The open day is an annual event. Anyone can go. You don't need to show any identification, but all your stuff goes through an x-ray machine, like in an airport. Cameras are allowed, but lenses are limited to 500mm. The open day is popular and is crowded. 

The RSAF has official photos on Flickr ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberpioneer/tags/rsafopenhouse2011/show/ ).

• Nikon D7000, 70-210mm f4-5.6
• At 135mm, f16, ISO 1600, 1/1000 seconds
• Manual exposure, center-weighted metering, auto white balance
• Picasa: Crop, auto contrast

Stopped down quite severely to get decent depth of field because DOF is really shallow at telephoto focal lengths. Lots of light outdoors plus the D7000 at ISO 1600 still looks good. Could have sacrificed some shutter speed and stopped down even more.