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.