Managed to survive another Thunder Over Louisville yesterday! Most people I've been around in a very long time, they were expecting a crowd in the neighborhood of 800,000. My camera was on the fritz but I still managed to get a few shots I like. This first photo is an F-100 Super Sabre.
My autofocus decided to be temperamental, half the time it couldn't even focus on large stationary objects like bridges, much less jets. The heat could be to blame, we set a record high temperature for Thunder at 87F (30C). Didn't seem to bother these A-10s though.
Attempted to shoot on manual and also tried manually focusing before shooting with autofocus on but neither were particularly successful. With the latter method I could have a plane in focus or nearly so and trip the shutter, only to have the autofocus take it completely out of focus, after which it would sometimes even refuse to focus on the Ohio River bridge in the background. Anybody ever have this happen to them? I haven't used this lens in a while but didn't have these problems the last time I took it to Thunder. I wonder how the autofocus works in this AC-130 gunship?
To make things even more frustrating about halfway through the air show my camera decided to have a complete meltdown. Went to look at a photo and all it would display was an hourglass. Tried turning it off and back on but toggling the power switch repeatedly did exactly nothing. Had to pull the damn battery to get it to turn off. That straightened it out a bit, although the autofocus was still cranky. Speaking of cranky, how salty do you think the jet jockeys were when these A-1 Skyraiders showed them up at close air support?
Even with the camera conniptions we still had a blast. B-29 Superfortresses like this one were responsible for a different sort of blast, they're what dropped the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wonder if we'd call that a war crime if the Russians did the same to Kharkiv and Odesa?
To beat the rush we dipped out as the sun was going down but we still managed to see the heliplane V-22 Osprey before we left. Pretty sure that is just the thing I need to be able to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a treetop flyer...
