Chairman’s Evening 2021
Thursday January 7th was our Chairman’s Evening. Rob had to organize something for this night and he invited Keith Wilson, an aviation photographer, to give us a talk on his life of photographing aircraft. This proved to be a very entertaining evening.
Keith’s air-to-air images were absolutely stunning. As well as a wide variety of aircraft we also got to see pictures showing Keith ready for action, strapped inside doorless planes being battered by the slipstream. Early on in the talk Keith stressed how important safety was, and showed some images that illustrated what happens when things go wrong. Amazing to see how much damage a seagull can do to the front of a Red Arrow.
Keith’s patter included many behind the scenes tales and a fair amount of technical information, such as what shutter speed you need to use to get a full circle of propeller movement. We were stunned at how close the pilots brought their aircraft to the photography plane, especially when Keith told us a lot of the frame filling cockpit shots were taken on a wide-angle lens. Quite simply breath-taking.
Keith considers backgrounds to be very important to his pictures and said Lake Tahoe is probably his favourite place to photograph aircraft.
This really was a superb night and we would like to publicly thank Keith for agreeing to put this presentation together for us. As someone said at the end of the evening, ‘what a job!’
