Steve Davies

Yoss My approach has always been to buy the best I can afford so that it is 'future proofed' to the greatest extent possible. Doing so means you can hold out longer before you upgrade your DSLR the next time. In that respect, I would go for the 40D. However, to mix things up a little, I would actually advise you to look closely at the D80 from Nikon, too. In the last few years Nikon have caught up and overtaken Canon on the 'amateur' market for DSLRs, and with today's announcement of the slightly pricer Nikon D300, I think that Nikon have really leveled the 'prosumer' playing field, too. Of course, you can't compare the Canon 40D with the D300 because they are at different price points, but I think that you should certainly consider the long-term implications of which company you choose to spend your heard earned cash with. My gut instinct is that Nikon are superior to Canon in the prosumer arena and can probably hold that high ground while Canon continues to dominate the Pro arena. That means that serious amateurs have a tough call to make. Sorry if this is of no help to you at all!

What are the benefits to having an associate unit? Will these USAFR guys deploy with Strike Eagle squadrons to help fill gaps in the pilot/WSO ratios? Even having read the article, I am not sure I know what it's all about.

Actually, Nikon are the second best maker of DSLRs in the world, so I won't bust your balls over it. You did pretty well. That's an excellent way of selecting your kit. And at that price point, the Nikon is definitely the nicer of the two cameras to operate and has a much more reasuring build quality. It'd only confuse you, as we both well know. So, when are you going to post some shots?

It is indeed true that Canon's EFS kit lenses are crap and that Nikon's are way superior. But that wasn't quite what I was getting at: the quality of the glass you use is of course important, but there are other things at play in the body (metering algorithms, accuracy and zoning; dynamic range; autofocus points and cross-type points; pixel quality; burst rate; custom functions etc.) that also influence which camera and which make best suits a particular kind of photography. With wet film it was all about the glass; with digital, that's no longer true.

Damn! I need to send you some flight gloves with instructions painted on them: push forward: trees get bigger slow shutter speed: props and rotors get blurrier pull back: trees get smaller fast shutter speed: props and rotors get frozen

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Jorryt As a professional aviation photographer, I honestly don't think that the argument is lame: it's more often he case that the people who get into debates end up being childish and immature. FWIW, I thought that the D70 looked like an excellent camera, and I am sure that the D80 is, too. The truth is that there are some things that Canon does better than Nikon, and some things that Nikon does better than Canon. I happen to believe that Canon's strengths are well suited to action/sports photography, and that includes aviation photography. That's why i use Canon. Not because I am blindly loyal to one brand over the other. On a separate level, Hacker and I know each other and he has expressed an interest in taking my kit with him on various TDYs. With him now using Nikon and me being a Canon bloke, that's now going to be even less likely to happen! I know you weren't. Nor am I.

Nice shot. So, when you gonna' join the big boys and leave Sports mode on your 30D behind ;)

Techsan There's always going to be a compromise between price, compactness and size. I am sure you know all of this, so i won't bang on about it. Since I use kit that costs more than $300, I don't have a good handle on what's competitive at the moment. However, I would offer a couple of pearls of wisdom that you may choose to follow when selecting a new camera: 1) Stick to a recognised camera manufacturer with a heritage of photography behind them (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Fuji, Ricoh and Leica are the ones that spring to mind). Personally, i would avoid the likes of Sony, Samsung, Panasonic etc. (although these companies make the PCBs that go inside almost all of the P&S digital cameras!) 2) Don't be sold on the number of megapixels the camera offers - more megapixels in no way equates to better image quality, and the two are largely unrelated! I'd rather have a 6MP camera that takes clean, sharp and vibrant images than a 12MP camera that does not. Remember, 6MP is plenty big enough to get a whopping A3 print, which is bigger than most people will usually want 3) Remember that cameras offering 10x zooms and the like are probably going to be asking so much of the lens that it's simply not going to be that great across its entire focal length. As with the megapixel advice, i would rather have a 4x optical zoom that takes sharp and contrasty images without the aberrations and softness, than a 10x optical zoom that doesn't 4) Finally, remember that if you want your digital images to look good, it's worth investing in a cheap programme like Photoshop Elements to do some minor tweaking on the computer. Post processing is a necessary evil in the world of digital photography, and even casual enthusiasts can learn to really make their images shine with only the smallest of time and effort And, since you offered, here's some I shot earlier!

You went Nikon? I wish you'd talked to me before you did that.

Gents Many thanks for the responses. I will go away and read the Airpower Perspective and see if I still have questions. I am now also curious about Airpower Against Terrorism, although I will heed CH's caution. Cheers Steve

I have just finished reading Not A Good Day To Die, which recounts Operation Anaconda principally from a ground pounder perspective. While the book makes clear that both pre-planned and on-call CAS was crucial to the operation from the get-go, and concedes that the Air Force was only vaguely involved in the planning of the operation, it does little to analyse the eventual failures of fixed wing CAS (both the pre-planned and the on-call) that it says occurred. Several things from the book struck me as curious: 1) That AF planners at the CAOC seemed so inflexible when an expanded list of targets was created in the build-up to the operation, despite seemingly having significant assets available to hand 2) That the AF and Army seemingly made no attempt to organise Fast FACs for the operation 3) That coordination between ground commanders and CAS assets was poor, despite the presence of TACPs and ETACs embedded with both SF and regular troops 4) That the A-10 was deployed to theater so late in the day 5) That ground pounders felt like they were having JDAM 'forced' on them when they called for CAS - what they really wanted, the book claims, was twenty mike mike 6) That the AF was unable, or unwilling, to fly an hours' worth of pre-planned precision strikes against targets before the operation was to start 7) That documented briefings, commands/orders and planning between Army/Air Force C2 cells/CAOC seems to have been almost non-existent I just wondered if there is an unclassified report that details what the USAF made of some of these questions post-operation, or whether some of the old salts here are able to comment on the unclassified lessons learned from all of this? The book, which I thought was excellent despite mixed reviews on Amazon, derided some of the USAF's leadership within CENTCOM (with good reason, it seems), but I'll leave that to another discussion. Any thoughts suitable for open source reading much appreciated.

Brilliant! Apparently, this is called 'Rickrolling'. From Wiki:

Interesting that Aero TV tries to justify showing the footage in the interests of 'keeping the rumour mill at bay', when the reality is that showing the footage is actually more likely to fuel that rumour mill, as well it knows. Why can't they just grow a pair of balls and say, 'we are showing this footage because we are a media outlet and that's our job', rather than make excuses? Beaver The centreline may well be a brick wall, but from this angle is it possible to tell who crossed it?

Is there any truth to the suggestion that the decision to force everyone to wear their PT gear was to stop people wearing gang colours? I ask because there has been some speculation that this issue is what prompted it:

Do you think that should happen before or after the United States Air Force or the US Government apologies to the host nation for the way that this has been handled?

Hydro Many thanks for the tip. As a point of principle, I decided not to spend another $40 on Missing Sync to make the Pearl actually work in the manner that RIM's marketing bumpf told me that it would. I suppose that already having to pay almost $100 per month (including line rental and the BB email service) was enough of an expense already for me. When I heard that the iPhone would be out in the UK in December, I decided to cancel my contract within the agreed get-out period, and will wait and see what the reviews for the Mac equivalent are like. At least I can rest assured that if I do get an iPhone, it'll sync with my Mac without having to splash out on third-party software! Cheers Steve

I used a BB Pearl, too. However, I sent it back after it consistently refused to sync with Mac OS X. Just a warning for all the Mac users out there.

RIP.

On a related note: FBO Announcement

That is funny shit, ShineR!

Gotta love the OV-10. Anyone here read Forward Air Controller Vietnam by Marshall Harrison? The best Vietnam FAC book out there.

= a sight that no man should have to endure, by the looks of things. Excellent!

OK, it gets worse...

Anyone care to explain what this is all about? Just by looking at the men you can tell that they can't dance. And is the chick in the bottom right corner actually a bloke? And while we're at it, anyone fancy starting up a caption competition?