Some photos of the new Archer

Well, our new baby has arrived at the aero club, a nice shiny Archer III. 2003 model, 350 hours on the clock, and DUDE it's nice! Here's a couple of snaps for you...

A random recent photo...

Climbing turn in an Archer. Shot with my fav point&shoot camera, a Olympus Stylus Epic. $20 on trademe :-)

A recent visitor..

Nice Comanche!!!

New Tamron TC joins my kit...

Just visited Auckland today and picked up a Tamron SP AF 2x Teleconverter to be used with my Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 and Nikon 300mm f/4 lenses. First impressions are fairly positive, but it does make the 80-200 autofocus hunt a lot, especially on the long end. I haven't tested it in bright light yet, nor have I got sample images back either, but I'm warming up to it. We'll see how much of a hit the image quality takes, but I'm sure that because I'm using good lenses with it, I should be reasonably happy with the images it makes. We will see!!


Update: Dec 15th

I've tested the TC in the field and there is good news and bad news. Good news is the image quality with the 80-200 2.8 is surprisingly excellent! Sample images below. Bad news is the AF hunts too much to be useful for shooting aircraft. Bummer!

I've returned it and swapped it for a 1.4x converter. Bad news with that is I was forced to return it in person. Cue 3 hour drive and an afternoon off work. Which is not all bad news! Further bad news is instead of pocketing the refund for the difference I ended up buying even more stuff :)

Warbirds open day

I wasn't going to go to the Warbirds open day at Ardmore last Sunday, but Euan twisted my arm and convinced me to go. Sunday was a glorious day so we grabbed FWS and shot up in the morning nice and early. At Ardmore were a lot more aircraft than I was expecting, including these:








There were also the usual suspects, including the ME108 and NUT, both of which I was very happy to see..





Then we had the Harvards, which did their usual thing...







The photo above looks like a bad case of lens flare but if you look close it's actually a smoky engine start...







The Thunder Mustang was a welcome sight, looking beautiful in the sun as usual. The hangar was immaculate, and the coffee was very nice as well! Big thanks to the Thunder Mustang team for making us feel welcome!






Unfortunately even though the Spitfire looked very nice it broke down just before it's scheduled display and wasn't able to be flown. Damn shame!






Some nice cars and planes were around the place, here's a couple...






Evan posing beside FWS... I don't think he saw the camera in my hand, and I suspect he wished he could fly back with us :-)




Just a photo on the way home of Hamilton central city from the air..



Sorry for the image quality on these, I had the lab do me a CD to save time... Looks great at 6x4" but not much chop fullscreen. Oh well...