JFK 10/31/2010 Halloween

[gonzalu]

Started early on Sunday trying to catch a sunrise which was to be pretty short lived due to heavy cloud cover. Headed to HoBe and caught a few pictures before I moved over to Bayswater. Met a new spotter from New England, Malcom... dragged him along :-)

Bays produced a few good images but it looked as if 31s were picking up so we ended the day there. Two folks from New England joined as well as Zee71.

I have not had time AT ALL to properly edit anything from the last few days so these are straight out of camera, cropped and posted.









































Interesting effect high above the landing pattern... heavy moisture in the air yesterday...



The sun and the clouds toyed with us all day!







Hopefully tomorrow brings the big guy back :-0







Then it was time to go home and Trick or Treat with the family! Hope the remaining team got some great images.

Cheers

[seahawks7757]

Sweet! Dam sharp for being right out of the camera. What is your setup?

[gonzalu]

Hey Brandon, thanks man, I look up to your images for quality and composition so I am humbled :-)

Yeah, the combo can produce good results. I MUCH RATHER do RAW processing in Lightroom 3.3 RC1 but JPGs can work sometimes if the conditions were good to begin with like good light... "it's all about the light"

Nikon D3 or Nikon D2Xs. I will interchange them depending on my mood or if I want to put 12MP into a smaller space or rather have better quality pixels. I tend to stick to the D3 90% of the time. The moon shot and sunrise were D2Xs with TC 1.7x

Lenses are either Nikon 200-400mm f/4 or 70-200mm f/2.8 with or without the TC17II teleconverter. I hate to have to use the TC as it causes lots of flaring, ghosting, contrast degradation etc. But sometimes you are pushed to do so ... well, not you guys with a front row seat hahahaa... But in NYC, to be safe, the nearest parks are still pretty far from the runways. RWY 4L/R are probably the closest we get at JFK and then, anything ON a runway will require 400mm on a crop sensor to fill 90% of the frame.

For JPG, I have the sharpness on the D3 dialed to max, contrast to max, Standard for tone curve but I may switch to Vivid for more punch without having to do it in post if I use straight JPGs. D3 is pretty soft to begin with because of a heavy handed low pass filter ( I have considered removing it )

D2Xs is set similarly with Sharpness in camera set to medium, tone curve to Mode 3/sRGB

That's about it... I do resize and then smart sharpen in PS CS5 and then upload to web.

[seahawks7757]

Cool deal! Like I said rather impressive for right out of the camera like that, and I look more forward to shooting JFK everytime you guys post shots from there.

[Zee71]

Nice catches of the Nippon and the Jet Blue 100th A320.

[gonzalu]

@seahawks7757 Deal, whenever you're out here, I would ebe more than glad to host you around JFK and maybe LGA and any other spot you may want to spot. Next time I visit Microsoft or F5 or Fluke, I am definitely leaving room for spotting at BFI and will look you up. Cheers

@Zee71. Thanks Mark. It was the first time I caught NCA and the JB I had before but in terrible light

[gonzalu]

I just popped the question to my wife if it would be OK to got to Anchorage. I can;t just tell her I want to go spotting up there because she always wants to tag along. Problem is, if it is ny other major city, I am not too worried... but what would she and my daughter be able to do up there? Is there something the family can do while I spot? LOL. Other than the beauty of the land which is a given!

[seahawks7757]

Honestly it is mainly hiking and stuff like that up there lol, I mean all I ever go up there for is spotting so not sure if there is anything else to do up there, I Would suggest looking at a state guide or something like that.