What’s the most dangerous position you have taken a photo from Spike?

The one that got this:

Following on from nearly a week of the 2014 FAI Asian-Oceanic Championship for Aerobatic Model Aircraft, Class F3A (a.k.a. a bit boring), today saw the local club flying at the same location.

Not as well attended as last year, with just a few stalls and a not very impressive collection of flying machines. The exceptions were a couple of jets which looked and sounded wonderful, and a very large Pitts which did all manner of acrobatics in a most lifelike manner. Worth turning up just to see it fly.

A long time ago in a land far away, a became much enamoured of a book titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Written by Douglas R. Hofstadter, the book explored the similarities between the three gentlemen through the mediums of “Zen Buddhism, math, fractals, logic, paradoxes, infinities, art, language, computer science, physics, music, intelligence, consciousness and unified theories”. Yeah, it was tough read; but it got me fired up about recursion, and the work of M.C. Escher in whose homeland I was residing at the time. His impossible geometry was intriguing:

I last paid income tax in 1984. Up to that point, the UK tax authorities had been happily collecting a proportion of my monthly salary via PAYE, and there was nothing I could do about it other than whinge.

Then in 1984 I went overseas and the world became a sunnier place. For reasons I have never fully understood, the conditions of overseas employment with Shell always included clauses that stated that the company would pay any income tax due by the employee. I went to The Hague from the UK on only a slightly higher salary; but a load more cash ended up in my pocket each month because I was no longer paying any tax. Good times.

There are currently some guys dicking around with model aircraft; or more formally stated, they are competing in the 2014 FAI Asian-Oceanic Championship for Aerobatic Model Aircraft, Class F3A.

Long term readers may recall that I used to make a monthly trip to Bira to photograph racing bikes. This was in the days of my monster Canon gear; and since moving to Micro Four Thirds I haven’t bothered much with action shooting; mainly because M43 cameras struggled to follow focus on moving targets.

The E-M1 offers significant improvements in this area; so yesterday’s track day seemed like an opportunity to see if I could grab a few shots. As expected, the failure rate is larger than with a Canon 1D; but I was very pleased with the quality of the images that I did manage to capture. Here are a few: