Panorama: Camarillo Airport, California

Today was yet another wonderful day at the annual Wings Over Camarillo airshow. Perfect weather, “clear and a million,” low 70’s, a little breeze — you couldn’t possibly ask for anything better.

As was the case yesterday, ’twas busy, busy, busy. My feet and knees are sore, my neck, face, and arms are a bit pink, and I’m probably a bit dehydrated (never a good thing when one has a history of kidney stones), but the show went off really well, as did our part in it. It’s with a great deal of satisfaction in both my organization and in my own efforts that I’ll sleep well, preferably for about eighteen hours, but more likely for six or seven. (Sometimes being a grown-up sucks.)

This panoramic picture was taken from atop a set of rolling stairs on the CAF site, about twenty minutes before the gates opened up to the public yesterday. (Click to enlarge.) Seeing as how I had a nice, high spot to shoot from, it’s a 360° panorama, starting and ending with the control tower.

This picture combines seventy-two images of 2304 x 3456 pixels (7.9 megapixels) taken with a Canon Rebel XT DSLR into an image of 76534 x 3448 pixels (263 megapixels). Because JPEG images cannot be any wider than 65,550 pixels, the final JPEG image was reduced down to 65500 x 2950 pixels (193 megapixels).

With great detail comes a need for great computing power — this panorama took fifty minutes to process and create.

A few comments about the image, if I may, moving from left to right:

• Something funky happened just to the right of the luxury camper van and to the left of the green forklift — the BBQ is seen twice, as are the houses on the hills in the distance.
• The first plane you see close-up is our beautiful PBJ, a B-25 variant flown by the Marines in World War II. Ours is about 75% restored and we hope to have it flying by Spring 2015.
• The very large yellow plane to the right of the PBJ is “Big Panda”, a Russian Anatov-2 operated by the CAF Wing in Riverside, California. In the foreground in front of it you can see our P-51.
• The area around “China Doll”, our huge C-46 transport plane, and the blue SNJ-4 trainer is also a bit munged up by the software. It may have something to do with the big metal stanchion in the immediate foreground — the software may have forced a match of two images on that, while mis-aligning the background with the two planes. This could probably be overridden manually in the software, but 22:20 already, plus two long days, plus fifty minutes more to re-process… You do the math.
• The big, dark blue plane in front of our left (east) hanger is our Hellcat.
• In between the hangers and in front of the right (west) hanger you can see the effect of people moving in the half-second or so between shots. They turn into “ghosts.”
• In our right (west) hanger is the prototype Flying Wing from the Chino Planes of Fame. It’s the only one flying in the world. (I believe the Smithsonian also has one, I could be wrong, but theirs doesn’t fly.)
• Just visible in the right (west) hanger is our Bearcat.

Questions? Comments? Were you there?