Space Shuttle Enterprise over NYC
Space Shuttle Enterprise over NYC on 04/27/12
Canon EOS 7D, Tamron 70-300/4-5.6VC at 218mm. 1/3200s @ f5.6, ISO 400
On April 27th 2012, after two previously postponed attempts, the Space Shuttle Enterprise was flown up from Washington DC to New York City. Right now it's still at JFK airport where it will be removed from the 747, placed on a barge and taken up the Hudson river to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
To photograph the flyby of New York I went out to Liberty State Park in New Jersey, which is right across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan and close to the Statue of Liberty. The day was cold with winds gusting to 30mph and mixed sun and clouds - so not ideal Space Shuttle watching and photographing weather, though I guess it could have been worse.
I knew from the outset that it was going to be pretty much impossible to get the shuttle and its 747 carrier aircraft in the frame with either the Statue of Liberty or the New York Skyline. With the plane due to fly pretty much overhead at a height of 1000-1500ft, there really was no angle that would include the plane and the ground without using a lens so wide that the shuttle would be a small dot. So I decided to concentrate on closeups and chose to use a Canon EOS 7D and an EOS 40D along with Canon EF500/4.5L and a Tamron 75-300/4-5.6 VC lenses. The Ef 500/4.5L was mounted on a tripod and the Tamron 75-300 was used hand held.
This shot would have been great, but it's not real.
It's a Photoshopped image of what it might have looked like if the shuttle had taken a different approach route
To get the ground and the aircraft in frame I'd have had to be further away from the flight path and preferably on a high building, and that just wasn't practical. The other possibility would have been to visit the Statute of Liberty and try to shoot upwards as the plane flew overhead getting both the statue and the shuttle in the frame if possible. I'm sure some people did that as it looked quite crowded over there!
Exposure for aircraft is tricky because most of the time the sky is brighter than the plane and the underside of the plane (which is what you are looking at) is often in shadow. So if you just use the default automatic metering the plane is often underexposed. On this day things were even more difficult because the background varied from blue sky to white cloud and the shuttle was flying in and out of shade and sun.
Space Shuttle Enterprise over NYC on 04/27/12
Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 500/4.5L USM, 1/3200s @ f4.5, ISO 400
To cope with the lighting I shot in RAW mode so that I had maximum flexibility in post exposure correction and I used exposure compensation while shooting, dialing in up to + 1.5EV when I saw that the background was much brighter than the aircraft, but dropping that back to 0 EV when the plane filled the viewfinder or it was in sunlight.
I chose to shoot mostly at ISO 400 because I know both cameras still give excellent image quality and low noise at that speed, and ISO 400 would give me a very fast shutter speed to both freeze the motion of the aircraft and guard against camera vibrations caused by the strong wind. The Tamron lens is image stabilized and the Canon 500mm was on a tripod, but even so a fast shutter speed never hurts!
The Tamron 75-300/4-5.6 VC is pretty sharp. This is a 100% crop from an image shot wide open (f5.6) at 249mm using an EOS 40D. Might have looked even sharper with the EOS 7D!
As things turned out I could probably have done just fine simply using the Tamron 75-300/4-5.6 VC since I was almost directly under the flight path and could fill the frame with the lens set to 200mm. However the 500mm did give me some extra range while the shuttle was approaching (it made two passes) so it was worth taking.
Space Shuttle Enterprise over NYC on 04/27/12
Canon EOS 7D, Tamron 70-300/4-5.6VC at 300mm. 1/5000s @ f5.6, ISO 400
There are a few more images in the Gallery here.
There will be one more chance to photograph a space shuttle in the air. Endeavour, taking the final SCA "ferry flight" ever, is currently scheduled to fly from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Los Angeles this fall.
