High atop the old abandoned Pasadena sanitary land, half way down Farley Rd. Jay Mangum, Scott Meyer and I photographed this year's Wings Over Houston airshow. The star performers were the Blue Angels. They flew six F/A 18s five of which were single seaters and one a two seater.

This was a real blast and I used several new tactics to capture the performances. One was a shooters stool that allows me to quickly swivel around as planes come streaking past at speeds of over 685 mph making it impossible to turn with them as they are traveling 334 yards in one second. I used the time stamp on the photos shot at 12 frames per second and it only took 2.5 seconds for the low flying F18 to streak by. That was a distance of about 9 football fields in 2.5 seconds. The strategy for shooting included shooting in aperture priority for regular jet performances to max. shutter speed, using shutter speed priority set at 1/640th of a second in order to get a slight blur on the props of propeller driven planes, and shooting in the 12 frames per second mode for the F18 fly-bys.

All photos but the first two are in the sequence in which they were taken and are 88 out of the 6000 taken. The first two are panos taken at the beginning of each day.

Below are three Internet sites that will give you access to the Wings Over Houston 2012 Home Page, the Blue Angels Home Page, and all the Youtube video of the 2012 Blue Angel performances.
Offical Site for Wings Over Houston 2012 - http://wingsoverhouston.com/index.htm
Official Internet site for the Blue Angles - http://www.blueangels.navy.mil/
Youtube videos of the Blue Angels for 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhvY5kLoGXE