Yorkshire Air Museum

Today I went to Elvington Airfield with Gav and Lisa:


Gav has a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens, which he was good enough to let me use. Clay was good enough to let me borrow his Canon 300D, so I have both of them to thank for these pictures.

Some kind of Canadian jet, it looked like it went out of service in the 60's, but the Canadian Air Force probably still use it, to control rogue moose or something. Bronach said this picture looks "very Top Gun", needless to say none of the legions of planespotters milling around with their mouths open and guts hanging over their belts looked much like Tom Cruise.

[update: I put a trés better version of this picture on flickr, ici]

Here's that Canadian jet again, if I ran the museum I'd paint little moose heads along the fuselage to designate kills.

A Tornado, this is the kind of hardware that helps Britain win wars.

Another shot with Gav's superwide fisheye lens. It's a cool effect, and you can focus the damn thing from a couple of centimetres away, but I think it's got quite limited applications. I'm no expert on lenses, but it seemed to cause some fringing and chromatic aberration - and the colours it produced were a bit off. Anyway, I took this from about a foot away from the nose of this plane. And still fitted the whole thing in frame!

Some off camera flash, Gav and Lisa acting like they just bought this Buccaneer. They didn't. I did. It's going in my front yard.

A tiny planespotter. Either that or a midget aircraft controller. He didn't have the ping pong bats, so I think he was just an imposter.

More fisheye lens japes.

Gav and Lisa, prior to checking out some high tech aviation weaponry.

Gav, in the cockpit. He spent ages in there, shouting "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhnnnnnyyyyoooooooooowww" and doing the machine guns ("Buh buh buh buh buh buh buh!" etc) while a queue of miserable looking Cub Scouts built up and the scoutmaster shot angry looks at us.

Gav in the pub, looking dazed after getting hands on with a Canberra.

Gav again. In the pub again. Cha'mone.