dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
[personal profile] dragonlady7
via http://ift.tt/1Q7Bpji:
It is a photo I took at an airshow of a British Avro Lancaster heavy bomber, one of only two still flying in the world! I went to the air show to see B-17s but the one that was supposed to come didn’t that year, so I got this one instead. They had a Hurricane and a Spitfire along with it. The reason is that we’re only a couple of miles from the Canadian border so there are a bunch of British history buffs kind of locally. 

I played roller derby for 8 years and had B-17 as my skate name, because my name is Bridget and I often go by B, and I grew up a history geek. And so I wanted a B-17 (the Queen of Bombers) in my header, to go with my blog name, even though it’s got nothing to do with anything I post about, but– I have not ever seen a B-17 up close, and I wanted to use one of my own images (I’m an amateur photographer, and used to specialize in sports but now mostly take photos of my sister’s farm).

A B-17 flew over my parents’ house a couple of years ago while I was sitting in their driveway (painting a sign, which is what I’m doing today, funny coincidence), and i heard it, but I couldn’t get out from under the tree cover in time to see it. Dad saw it; he had identified it by the sound of the engines, because his uncle’s house when he was a kid was right at the end of the runway of then-Idlewild, now JFK Airport, and the Douglas DC-3 [then a really common plane] had the same kind of radial engines as the B-17, just half the number. So he heard that and knew immediately what it was. 

I’ve actually done WWII re-enacting (as French Resistance! I got to fake-shoot at fake-Nazis! It was great but I’ll never do it again because the event organizers were misogynistic cockfaces!) and sometimes there are B-25s and P-51s and so on at those things, so I’ve seen and touched all of those, but never a B-17.

To answer all of this in a far wordier fashion than necessary, but hey, I’ve been painting farm signs all morning and it’s nice to think about something else. 

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dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
dragonlady7

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