Pic(k) of the week 51: Stay on the line

Most of you probably know that my day (or night) job is being an airline captain for a major airline based in Dubai. Guess which one!

Beside the line flying, I've also been holding an instructor/examiner rating for a number of years. One of the more interesting training duties is Base training, which is taking cadet pilots (ab-initio, inexperienced first-officers) out in an empty Airbus A330 to do actual take-off and landings (touch&go's) for the very first time in the real aircraft! Earlier this month I've done quite a few of these flights which are very rewarding from a job satisfaction point of view.

One of the things that feels very different in the real aircraft compared to the simulator, is taxying the aircraft. As an instructor, I frequently find myself saying to the trainees, "Stay on the line". I'm sure this explains the image caption.

The shot above is made with my brand-new Nikon P7000, a compact camera with a pro touch! It replaces my 2 year old Canon G9. So far I've been very happy with the new Nikon's image quality and interface. Initially writing a single raw file to the memory card took more than 5secs, which is really slow! A firmware update and buying a 4GB high speed class 10, Sandisk card reduces the time to less than 2secs. Very reasonable for RAW file writing on a compact camera.

Needless to say that this camera will not replace Pro gear like my NIKON D700 with 2.8 lenses.

Image details:

Nikon P7000

ISO 100, 50mm, f5, 1/1000s

RAW file development in Lightroom 3.3

Single shot HDR with Photomatix 4

Contrast adjustment Software ColorEfex

More of my Airline images can be found here.

To the ones celebrating, Merry Christmas

Click that shutter,

BJORN

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