Off another trip with the local Eureka High School Navy JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) – this time a one week trip to San Diego for the cadets' yearly orientation tour. I've volunteered for these trips a few times now, officially as a chaperone, but mainly as the photographer to document the experience.

The nineteen high school students on this trip saw a lot of Navy and Marines activity, even two days aboard the USS Cleveland. For photographs, it was definitely a “target-rich” environment! I will post quite a few photos eventually. For now, I need to just get started with a couple shots, including the one inside the Navy cargo plane that took us all on a rare non-stop flight from Eureka, California 800 miles down the coast to San Diego.

Navy C9 Cockpit with Pilots Eric Werner (L) and Bob Hallahan, descending to San Diego, North Island field.

The central office of any aircraft is the cockpit, a great place for interior photographs, especially while actually flying.

At the slow shutter speed, I braced the E-330 against the ceiling, figuring the vibrations transmitted to the camera would match the movement of the lighted instruments.

Zuiko 7-14mm/4, 1/4 sec, f4.0 with Metz 54 as bounce flash, ISO 1600, RAW capture.

Once again the E-330 live view tilt-screen LCD came through to get the shot, with camera snuggled up against the ceiling and the LCD tilted back for composing the frame. Also, the immediate review of the photos kept the pilots involved in the shot, which needed several minutes for the outside light to dim enough to match the interior light of the gauges. To light the pilots, I finally found through shooting and reviewing that my Metz hotshoe flash set on lowest output was still a little too bright. So I placed two fingers over the flash head and started to see perfect foreground exposure. Also, by lighting the pilots with the flash, a sharp foreground was assured, which gives an apparent definition to the photograph, even with slightly blurred instruments from the 1/4 second shutter speed.

This photograph was a perfect example of using digital review as a scratchpad for visualizing the final shot that balances three distinctly different light exposures. Fortunately, our descent over San Diego city lights corresponded perfectly with the lights in the cockpit, just as the flight engineer behind me was starting to get a bit impatient about me blocking his seat for the landing!

Contrast the cockpit shot above to the one on the Lympa Log page showing the Coast Guard Falcon HU-25F, taken with an Olympus C-8080. I also used the C-8080 and its remarkable, sharp lens to take the one below inside the roomy cockpit of a Coast Guard HC-130. Both daylight cockpit photos used the Metz as a bounce flash against the ceiling.

You couldn't ask for a finer view of the California Redwood Coast, looking out the front of a Coast Guard HC-130 "Hercules", 500 feet over the ocean about a couple miles south of the Klamath River mouth. For a daylight shot, flash and outdoor light are much easier to balance than the night-time cockpit shot above.

Since this page so far is turning out to be about aircraft, here is the outside of a Coast Guard HC-130. It was taken on a flyover of Kitty Hawk in November of 2003, on dedication day for the new Icarus Monument to a century of flight.

The C-130 is a huge airplane, "sort of like flying formation with a house" according to one CG helicopter pilot.

The photo was taken from a CG HH-60 helicopter using a motorized Leica R8 and the same APO 70-180/2.8 Tele-Elmarit lens that I have adapted now to the Olympus E-330. That lens camera combination is the one at the top right of Lympa Log pages and is the blog's home page logo (click Lympa Log Page Index below).

This photograph was first published in the hardcover coffee table book, "The Coast Guard", edited by Tom Beard.

Another air-to-air photo of the HC-130 from this flight is the second image on this Lympa Log web page.