I was reading thru a few web sites on aviation, and for some reason an article on the British Air Force selling all their Harriers to the US got me thinking about the small old school airfield in Rhinebeck, NY. I have written about the airfield on a few occasions and it still is not out of my system. It might be because as a young kid of 14, my dad and I adventured out to the very rural and very small airfield on a father/son trip. My dad’s passion was flight, 20 years in service as a bomber pilot and retired, he talked about making the trip like it was a pilgrimage.
We lived on the NH seacoast so the trip for us was about four hours, it was a beautiful mid summers day. Back then there was no internet, so you needed to call ahead to do your planning, GPS, not invented yet, you used a map, cell phone (ha), and it was a standard shift in the old car. So a trip took more effort and it had more satisfaction on arrival. Now I grew up across the street from an active grass airfield so driving to the aerdrome did not have much impact in that respect. The airfield also had those old rusty hangers with that musty ancient dust smell imbedded in the walls and plane fabric.
Yes, I said fabric, these planes are all fabric, no metal. They are wood. They are engines that are over 100 years old. One of kind. I remember my father searching out for the owner of Rhinebeck, (a very interesting man with a passion and foresight for aviation history way ahead of his time) and they reminisced for hours, first planes, Jennies, Piper cubs, engines, airfields, barnstorming. I now wish that the portable tape recorder like you have in your smart phone was around, because their conversation was a language that was reserved and earned between two airman who respected each other as active participants and witnesses of early flight and their heros.
So when my professional career landed me in upstate NY, some 25 years after that father /son trip, I headed back over to the Aerodrome. Half expecting to see the encroachment of the years on my youthful memories. Low and behold, it was a step back in time. The same aircraft, preserved and cared for by over the years by these stewards of aviation. I met up with a man who had been at the airfield for thirty years, so a direct link to my past. At 91 years of age, his eyes still glistened with fantasy of flight stories and did not hesitate with a story which beget another story….amazing……
Yet, I was here on one hand as a photographer. I had talked my self into purchasing the Nikon 200-400 f/4 and had a TC-1.7 and I wanted to work on Image taking and at the same time have some archival memory of these pre WW2 planes. The weather was perfect, to perfect, not a cloud around. This is a killer problems for avaition photography. Planes fly and move in the sky, so no clouds, how do you show motion ? I recall reading that taking an image of plane on a blank bald blue sky was like shooting a brick. No passion, no movement….So what to do, of course , who cares, I’m shooting bricks for an hour, working on panning, f stops, speed, aperture….Working the practice…. It was soon going to have a pay off.
Rhinebeck has a sort of aerial skit that last a few hours, where they get these old planes up and down under the pretense of an old Snidely whiplash cartoon. A one point of the show, they announced that in the old barnstorming days of the 1920s, a performance trick that the better pilots would try to pull off was to have two planes go up, and at around 1,500 the pilot of one plane would toss a roll of toilet paper out the side and the pilot of the lower flying training plane would try to sever the TP before it floated to earth.
So there is the photo challenge, Blue sky, TP for gesture/motion and use your panning skills to capture everything crisply on focus and on time…..ha…I thought I’d give it a shot….I’m not sure whose finger was on the shutter but I was able to come away with a nice image that I hope you’ll enjoy to look at.
Link Rhinebeck Aerodrome
