Lake City Fly-in Today marked the 51st Dawn Patrol Fly-in Breakfast at Home Acres Airport, “Y91”, in Lake City , Michigan. Actually, since last year had really bad weather and was all but rained out, the advertising flyers say “50th Anniversary Do-Over”. Breakfast is served from 7am to 11am. Y91 sports two intersecting grass runways with beautiful backgrounds for the aviation photographer. The fly-in attracts a variety of airplanes, floatplanes, warbirds, bi-planes, homebuilts, and even an occasional helicopter. On a given year, 60 to 100 planes make their way to the fly-in. This year a couple of Stearman’s including the one above attended.
Then, this beautiful Cessna 185 on floats from Northwoods Aviation showed us how it’s done.
Looks like it’s a family fly-in. And the C-185 is just the right size.
What are those tail feathers below? Yeah, it’s a Navion in fantastic condition.
This fly-in was the first time I really used the Nikon 1 V1 to capture images at an aviation event. With good technique, high quality images can be captured. Continuous autofocus does not work for lenses attached through the FT-1 adapter. So, in order to get good takeoff and landing images, I found it necessary to pre-focus and shoot at that spot as the aircraft passes. One or two images will be in focus. Then, it seems that since the autofocus is really fast, it’s possible to use it to get a shot as long as its close to focus when you depress the shutter. Certainly, some practice will likely be necessary. It’s makes you appreciate the Continuous Auto-focus on a DSLR.
