Short lived

Today is the start of the 10th Bournemouth Air Festival, a free event that has attracted some 8.5 million visitors over the past decade to the Dorset coast. However, the four days of flying has become less and less appealing to this particular photographer, due to the staid nature of its programme.

The one saving grace is the RAF Display Team, The Red Arrows; always worth watching; always worth a few shots in spite of the fact that I have thousands of images of them spread across several hard drives. In addition, their performance is scheduled for 6pm, so the light will be getting good by that time of evening.

Game on.

I arrive about 90 minutes beforehand, find a suitable viewpoint, and warm-up by taking casual snaps of other displaying aircraft as with one of the Twister Duo (pictured), and free-fall parachute jumpers that entertain the crowd before the main event.

But shortly before it starts I manage to put quite a severe dent in the focusing ring of my 300mm f/2.8 lens - I dropped it again the wooden rail of the cliff fence - and it won't focus.

Disaster! The focus ring won't turn by hand let alone autofocus, so I'm stuffed. I know straight away I will not get any more images, and somewhat disappointed, I leave before it starts.

It's going to be a costly repair.



300mm f/2.8 AF-S VR Nikkor with TC-14EII converter. 1/2000 second at f/5.6. Matrix metering. - 1 stop EV compensation. ISO 160



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