East Kirkby Air Show 2022

I thought it would be nice to share my thoughts on East Kirkby Air Show this year. It’s not the biggest air show that I’ve been to, but it really is a gem that I thoroughly enjoyed.

If you don’t know about the East Kirkby Air Show it’s hosted by the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre, which has a very awesome history about it that you can read up on there website: https://www.lincsaviation.co.uk/. The centre is well worth a visit even if there isn’t an air show on.

So back to the day. Sandwiches packed and at the ready (I didn’t want to lose any precious photography time queuing for food and drinks, that’s a lesson I learned last year!), I found a nice quiet spot at the end of the airfield and set up camp.

I’m going to let you into a small secret here, I’m about as useless at plane identification as I am with insects and birds. I do enjoy the subjects that I capture photos of, but I mostly enjoy the challenge of capturing them and editing them. With that in mind I apologise in advance if any names are incorrect (but feel free to let me know!).

One of the things I love about this air show is more of a focus on smaller, agile propeller planes. Sure, an F-35 is nice, but usually it does a couple of passes and it’s gone in the blink of an eye. Whereas the prop planes seem to take their time and the enjoyment they seem to get from flying really shines through in the manoeuvres they’re making.

*An Extra EA-300 handled by the Global Stars team having a bit of a twirl.*

With my mind screwed on that this day would be filled with slower planes I was very eager to try and capture some of them with decent propeller spins. If you don’t know what I’m talking about….here we go. Planes without propellers are a lot easier in some ways. You are pointing a camera at the sky in full sun and you can get some great shutter speeds, such as 1/4000s. However, if you take a photograph of a propeller plane with this shutter speed you will freeze the action…..but you will also freeze the prop. Do you know what planes have frozen props? One’s that aren’t working right or stalling. So there’s an element of uncanny valley with them, because you know that propeller should be moving.

So what do you do? You take control of that shutter speed and slow it right down. The downside of this is you open yourself up to a lot more blurry shots unless you nail the panning. I don’t know if this is good or bad (someone might call me an amateur here, and that’s fine, I am), but on the day I took 3000 shots. I kept 300 of those shots and 29 made it to edit. I hate machine gunning the camera, but I was a man on a mission, and I’m glad I did as it was interesting to see a series of shots where I nailed the panning just right to capture the focus.

*A Miles 65 Gemini 1A soaring gracefully through the sky (with full prop spin!)*

I’ll finish up with my highlight from the day. The absolute show stealer for me was the AeroSuperBatics Wingwalkers. My hat goes off to anyone willing to do this. What a performance. Not only do the planes themselves give a great show but the people on top of the plane…..all I can say is well done. I think the last time I had the pleasure of seeing a display like this was at RAF Scampton Air Show in 2017, but I wasn’t as well prepared as I was today to capture such a great performance.