i picked up a book from the library last night, "special problems" revised
edition, ca.1981 by the time life editors, "...demonstrat[ing] that
distinguished images can be wrestled from the most daunting photographic
circumstances." has the story of bruce dale and his winning shot of
an L1011 (TriStar) landing, which ofcourse was taken with an OM2 and Zuiko
lens. thought you all might like to read, so here goes:
pic available here:
http://skipwilliams.com/images/not_mine/L1011_ng_1977.2.jpg
any typos are mine
\\\\start text////
For a /National Geographic/ picture essay on air safety, Dale needed a dramatic
photograph to counterbalance the technical illustrations in the
story. He came up with the idea of positioning a camera outside a jetliner in
such a way that it would look down on the body of the plane and
show its position during take-off and landing, when most accidents occur. After
discussion with several airline manufacturers, he succeeded in
persuading Lockheed to help with the project.
Using a model of the selected jet, the L-1011 TriStar, Dale made preliminary
shots to determine exactly where his cameras should be placed to
ensure dramatic pictures. He decided to mount two cameras high above the
fuselage of the plane, near the top of its vertical tail fin. This
promised an excitiing perspective from a spot that remained relatively stable
during flight. The cameras were to be motor-driven 35mm SLRs with
automatic exposure control, 250-frame exposure backs and 16mm fisheye lenses
that had 180° angles of view. They were attached to either
side of the tail fin and enclosed in specially made windproof aluminum
housings. One was mounted perpendicular to the fail fin; the other was
canted at a 30° angle so that when the plane banked to the right, the camera
would show a level horizon (/top diagram, page 84/).
The take-off was planned for a late afternoon, with a return in the early
evening. Dale therefore loaded one camera with slow ISO 64/19° film
for daylight shows and the other with ISO 200/24° film for pictures taken after
sunset. The triggering device for the shutter releases was a set of
cables that ran from the cameras down through the tail fin and along the
fuselage to the cockpit, where Dale would be sitting (/bottom
diagram, pages 84-85/)
Because it was such an expensive proposition, there was to be only one flight,
from Lockheed's test-flight airbase at Palmdale, California. When
Dale had finished mounting the cameras on the plane and was about to seal them
in their housings, he radioed the cockpit to test-fire one of
them. "I held my ear to the camera to make sure it was working," Dale said. "It
went 'click-click-click-click-click.'" After making some
adjustments, Dale told the cockpit to trip the second camera. The same thing
happened in reverse: "The second camera went 'click' and the
first just ran away."
"The mistake, in retrospect," Dale said, "was using three wires instead of
four. All of our tests worked when the cameras were off the plane. But
metal cameras on the metal surface of the airplane created electrical
interference because of the common ground wire. It was a variable we
hadn't counted on." At the time, however, Dale had no leisure to speculate on
what was going wrong. It was nearly 5 o'clock in the afternoon,
so he had to propose some immediate changes to save the shooting session. Dale
had one of the Lockheed engineers site in the tail section of
the plane, just below the cameras, and operate the shutter releases manually.
During the flight, Dale sat in the cockpit and told the engineer over the
plane's intercom when to trigger the shutters. Fortunately, this bit of
teamwork succeeded in producing dozens of extraordinary views of the jetliner
taking off and landing. The masterpiece was the one at right--
taken in level flight but with the canted camera, because the level camera was
out of film. It appeared as a three-page foldout in an issue of
/National Geographic/ magazine.
////end text\\\\
illustrations/diagrams/photos omitted; hard to scan a fat book's center section
pages.
hope you enjoyed reading.
/Acer V
--
dum spiro, spero
http://users2.ev1.net/~wesiddiquis/siddiq/
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