I went to the air show at Andrews Air Force Base a week ago, an annual pilgrimage that I’ve made every year (except once) since 1988. The picture above links to the web gallery I’ve created with some of the better pictures I took.
I’ve been wanting to better organize my photography page for some time now, as it’s pretty disjointed and clunky. I like the simple format that the Web Album Generator software uses (as opposed to the somewhat tackier, uncustomizable templates that PhotoShop Elements and ACDSee use), but I still need to customize the style sheets to add some missing elements and to bring it somewhat in line with the rest of my site.
The show itself was a little disappointing, mostly because of how disorganized it was. One of the main reasons for this was W himself, as he departed and returned during the air show. This wreaked havoc on the schedule, forcing not only all of the upcoming aerial displays to be grounded and incoming aircraft to loiter God knows where before they could make their flybys, but also halting all ground transportation. The Thunderbirds put on an unusually sloppy show, as one of their aircraft was down and for some reason was not replaced by the alternate. That meant that all of the four-aircraft “Diamond” formations and six-aircraft formations just looked off. And the performance itself was cut short by almost a half-hour when W returned, so overall it was quite an anticlimax.
I know I sound a little whiney, but I look forward to this every year, and having seen it run much better in years past makes it that much more frustrating. I think I got some decent pictures, though, and I’m pretty happy with my new Canon 20D digital SLR. I learned a couple of things about how it behaves under these conditions, so I should be set for the biennial (and local!) Patuxent River Air Expo in September… 🙂
Update: As I detail in this post, I’ve since revamped the photography portion of my site and have fixed the links to the old gallery above. Hopefully I didn’t break anything too badly… 😉
