As already mentioned in my previous post, I spend a couple of days in Scandinavia last week. One of the reasons was to attend the spotters’ day for the annual NATO Tiger Meet aerial exercise on the 1st of June.
During this year’s edition the economic recession in Europe really became evident. Not only was Portugal, the original host nation this year, because of lack of money forced to pass on the honour of organising the event to Norway, one of the European nations the least affected by the “Euro crisis”. But it was also apparent that the number of participating nations has dwindled too, compared to last year’s edition.
Fortunately, it wasn’t all bad news at Main Air Base Ørland (Ørland hovedflystasjon): the local authorities had made sure that the several hundred enthusiast photographers had little to wish for. In the end this resulted in some incidents when people were actually standing/sitting/lying on the taxiways with more than one not very amused pilots passing close by in their aircraft…but that’s another story. The weather was interesting too: sunny with nice cloudy features as backdrop…when it wasn’t raining!
Since we had other plans for the afternoon we only stayed for the morning flying, with (I’m very happy to say) excellent results.
Last year, I bought my Nikon D7000 with a 70-300mm variable aperture kit lens. Not always completely happy with it (and realising I’m again taking photography more serious than I initially thought I would) I recently traded it in for a Nikon 70-200mm 2.8 VR II. Yes…it is expensive…but worth every cent! In the end it’s still the man behind the camera who is taking the pictures and not the equipment, but good tools are essential to do a good job.
In 2013, the Tiger Meet will once again be held at Ørland. With this year’s result I guess it will be worth considering going again.
Marco