The Royal International Air Tattoo

Fully lit Typhoon was awesome!

'This pilot is just as handsome as he is skilful!' Booms the enthusiastic Italian commentator as this particular pilot struts his stuff! and on this display he must be very handsome indeed!! For we are at the frankly astonishing

Royal International Air Tattoo.

This is the first time I've been to this Airshow and I have to say It's absolutely amazing! I can't think of better range and display of aircraft, from modern-day jets, old classics, helicopters and so many acrobatic display teams I lost count. It's also huge but not so huge as to be difficult to see everything but plenty big enough to find a great place to plot (bring a gazebo if you want) along the runway and see the displays in all their glory.

There are a bewildering array of aircraft to see, static and in the air.

Fighter jets....Hmmmmm

I had tickets for the brilliant Pimms tent which was situated about 50 meters from the runway, right by the take off and landing end, and what a great place to be, fantastic for taking pictures and being right in the action. The Typhoon at full take off thrust was an experience I'll never forget! The commentary was top notch, informative but never boring and in the case of the Italian commentator, very funny. Oh and the copious amounts of Pimms only helped proceedings.

The Red arrows were one of the many display teams from around the world.

The Italian displaying their colours in style!

The precision of the Swiss display team was just insane!

As were the French.

These are 100% in-camera shots, no contextual cropping whatsoever......mental flying skils!!

As you can Imagine, for photographers, this is a fantastic event, especially if you're into aircraft (I'm more of a car man myself) A long lens is obviously a must but being more of a flora and macro specialist my longest lens is Canon's trusty 100-400 mm f4.5 is L, coupled to a 1.4x Extender, so on a full frame 5D3 gave me a maximum focal length of 560mm. This was usually plenty but in event like this obviously more can be better and judging by the hardware on display (EF 1200 anyone?!) a lot of others thought so too, If you suffer from lens envy then expect to suffer! That's not to say you need serious hardware to get good pictures, a simple point and shoot will get some nice shots, especially with the abundance of aircraft on the ground. I was lucky with the weather, mostly sunny with nice, fluffy clouds in the background keeping things interesting.

Typhoon 'show of force'

Great to see the Vintage stuff too.

Not just planes.

All in all a fantastic event which I cannot recommend highly enough and will endeavour to go to every year.....If only to hear the Italian commentator again!