Because of the bad timing of my arrival relative to the Southern California forest fires, the photo opportunities were pretty limited. And you are paying how much to see these photos? Yeah, thought so. So no complaints, please. I was only present for "the high game", which explains the "high fliers" seen below. Some of the planes did egress relatively low, but unfortunately still far away.
The photos below were done with a 400mm f5.6 lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter, which is equivalent to 560mm at F8. The film used is Fuji Provia 100F, though the images have been converted to grayscale since contrast enhancement of the images tends to make the color appear very oversaturated.. The photos shown are from 4000dpi scans of 35mm film. Granted, you have seen better photos of all the planes below, but these photos do indicate the capabilities of long distance photography of speeding airplane. [Maybe you'll get lucky some day and get a photograph of an X-plane.]
The distance to the plane can be computed using the following equation:
IS/FL = OS/OD
where
IS = image size on the film plane
FL= focal length
OD =distance from the front of the lens to the target object (near infinity for this equation to work)
OS = target object size
The goal is to compute OD. The image size is computed knowing how many pixels in size a specific part of the plane appears on the film. The focal length is 560mm. The target object size can be found from references such as the www.fas.org website. The equation below is rearranged to solve for OD:
OD = OS*FL/IS
To compute the distance to the plane, the length of the plane was used. [You can barely tell where the wings end.] There will be some error in this calculation since the plane is not directly above. The length of the body of the plane is 298 pixels. Dividing by 4000, this corresponds to 0.0745 inch. The length of the B-1B is 146ft according to the FAS. Doing the math, the distance is 3.7 miles.
The distance computation for this plane is based on the wingspan, which the FAS indicates is 43ft, 4 inches. The wingspan is 215 pixels. This corresponds to a distance of 3.4 miles.
The distance computation for this plane is based on the wingspan, which the FAS indicates to be 172 ft. The size of the image on the film is 383 pixels. This yields a distance of 7.5 miles.
For the contrail fanatics, I present the following image, suitable for a bookmark (the pre-internet kind of bookmark). Now exactly how stealthy is a B2 with a long contrail?
These choppers were about 3.5 miles away. The flew a similar course at night as well, all blacked out but easy to spot as silhouettes against the night sky with night vision equipment. The hub of the tail rotor was quite visible through night vision.
Did I mention the planes were camera shy?
