2021 is underway after what was, for us, a whirlwind Christmas that came and went extremely quickly. Between the Port Fairy trip and now, I had four days off around Christmas and otherwise just odd days here and there. I have made the most of many of those days, sailing or fishing with the boys and going for walks with Carolin, but work has certainly built up and been quite pressured.
I’m quite good these days at using my time-off as well as possible. Over the last couple of weekends on-call, I’ve used the down time in between duties to get out with the camera and pleasingly, the local air ambulance has obliged by flying on these occasions. The first two images are from a fortnight or so ago, as the helicopter returned from the city. I am quite pleased with them. Click through to see more info on Flickr, such as camera settings etc.
The next image is small because it is so heavily cropped. This morning, under fearsome skies, the aircraft departed en-route to an emergency. This time, it took off to the west, before circling around to the North and away. I was not in a great spot and had not set up the camera as I would have liked, meaning that the couple of shots I did get all had ‘stopped’ blades as the shutter speed was too fast. The resulting image looks somewhat unnatural, with a helicopter obviously in the sky, but the rotors apparently stationary.
I’ve since done some reading and it seems one must have a shutter speed as low as 1/125 to get a rotor disc. The images above are 1/200 at ISO 400 and f6.7, so perhaps that’s a starting point going forward.
In general, it is rare to see something particularly interesting at Traralgon airfield I’m afraid. Unlike Tyabb, where all sorts of curiosities will fly in and out on occasion. A nice silver twin did pop in once last year, it looked like some sort of Beechcraft immediate post-war machine. There are some good looking helicopters here at the DWELP base, ready for fires that thankfully have not occurred yet, but I can’t get photos of them as they are behind fences. The aircraft below did amuse me though. It’s anti-theft system probably can’t be beaten.
