With some regret and self-reflection, I’m posting this as a somewhat disappointing memo.
I knew in advance that I might have a bit of waiting time at Fukuoka Airport after work in late January before boarding my return flight.
I knew this beforehand, but since it wasn’t certain, I hesitated to bring my heavy camera and lenses along with my work gear. I had heard before that the observation deck at Fukuoka Airport is close to the runway and you can get some pretty good photos there.
So, I decided to think of it as “location scouting this time” and packed my LUMIX GF10 and Leica DG 45mm F2.8 into my bag. I figured the LUMIX G 35-100mm F4-5.6 would be too slow for sunset shots, and since I was using the GF10, the Leica DG 50-200mm F2.8-4 was out of the question—it would have been way too heavy anyway.
So, I ended up having about an hour to shoot on the observation deck. The result? Well, given my lack of experience photographing aircraft and this minimal setup, it was admittedly tough.
Fukuoka Airport, 4th floor. This is the view from the observation deck near evening.
Indeed, the observation deck where the terminal building, apron, and runway are close together, and flight arrivals and departures are relatively frequent for a local airportm is an excellent location for photographing planes.
Even with an MFT 45mm lens (90mm equivalent), this size of equipment can be captured.
Scenes with multiple planes coming and going are pretty exciting, right?
But to properly capture aircraft taking off and landing, 45mm just wasn’t enough.
To make matters worse, in the backlit evening environment, composing and focusing with the GF10 without a viewfinder was incredibly difficult.
I took a few shots by guesswork, and this one was the absolute best I could manage to post on my blog, swallowing my pride.
Even this embarrassingly out-of-focus photo required quite a bit of cropping to fix the crazy horizontal tilt.
All this and more is simply my current status as a perpetual beginner, so I’m reporting it here as filler blog content. Well, at least I got the location scouting done (says the sore loser).
