Our friends Katie and Dan were absolutely wonderful hosts during our recent stay at their home in Charlottesville VA. The knocked themselves out while we were there. I've blogged about our visit before but while I was going through my library of images from the trip, I came across one that reminds my how nice it is to have friends like these two. While planning our trip I mentioned that I wanted to get in a lot of photography while we were there, it's a beautiful area. I'm told that having a photographer around always stopping, waiting for the right moment, dictating where you go, when you are not one yourself could get a little tiresome (imagine that .... hmmm). True to form these guys went beyond the call, making suggestions and providing lots of opportunity for me to shoot as much as possible. Dan recalled a particular tree he had heard about out near the airport, it had been referred to as a "heritage tree". Apparently it was a large old oak tree and it had stood for possibly hundreds of years.
I thought well, let's take a look and while we were out running errands one day, Dan took me there. What a magnificent, majestic, old oak tree, not far from the road in a field. We parked at what looked like a maintenance entrance to the field and I was immediately struck by this enormous lone tree. I cannot recall ever having seen such a large oak, spreading limbs so low and wide. As we approached it's true size started to sink in, it was gigantic. We reached the base of the trunk, I took a few quick shots under the limbs with the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background and quickly realized that with nothing close by to include in the image for scale, the immensity of this beast would be lost ... so ... "hey Dan, could ya stand up against the tree and lean on it while I take a shot ... eh" ? Click ... that should do it, but "wait, stay there Dan" ... tripod out, camera mounted low, self timer 10 sec ... run into frame ..... click ! That's it now we're both in the shot buddy.
OK that certainly shows how big the trunk of this tree is but I could not get the whole tree in frame with my 17-40mm @ 17mm. I started to back up to get a shot of the whole tree with the Blue Ridge in the background, back, back, more ... back ... wait WFT is that noise ? Holy crap ! It's a freakin' fighter jet coming in straight overhead. We're at the end of a runway and this guy is on final approach .... man he's low ... real low. I picked up the camera attached to the tripod and started shooting (photographing) ... remember I had my 17-40 on the camera ... not the best lens for aircraft in flight but this guy was close.
... full frame at 40mm overhead
... wait ... so that maintenance gate ... and those towers ... we're just outside the airport at the end of the runway Dan. We better start thinking about leaving before security gets here ... wait here comes the fighter again, click, click, click ... crap are those engines loud !
DJE
No comments:
Post a Comment