Frontiers of Flight

The Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas is an assembly of artifacts celebrating the history of flight. My son and I were there once 3 or 4 years ago for someones birthday party but we never made it back with the family.

There are some interesting artifacts, several restored aircraft, some replicas..etc. Worth the admission price ($8.00 for adults, $5.00 for kids). My kids have been to some fantastic museums in the past, not to mention both the Kennedy Space Center in FL and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, so they've seen it all. Not sure what they were expecting, but I think this one left them a little disappointed. Still, plenty of interesting things to see.

The lighting actually wasn't bad for pictures, but like I've mentioned before, the Nikon D80 has severe limitations when it comes to low light. I used my 50mm f1.8 while we were indoors and got a few interesting shots, but the low light shots are far too grainy. I didn't push my ISO past 300.



The museum is located right next to Love Field so the kids enjoyed watching planes come and go from the parking lot. There's a wire mesh fence dividing the museum parking lot from the airport.

At first this pic looks like she's jumping, but she's actually trying to balance herself on one of parking space dividers while carrying a toy plane she bought inside.

No Flash in the Author's Chair

I LOVE it when I don't have to use a flash!

Flash's are usually too harsh and very hard to control. In low light situations you'd be better off shooting with a wide aperture if you can. When outdoors I sometimes use a very subtle fill flash just to fill in some shadows or to make a key light visible in the subjects eye, but in a situation where I have little control (like in my daughters school) I hate using it.

Of course, using a higher ISO setting will increase the cameras sensitivity to light which also helps in low light situations. But with a Nikon D80, you can't really go higher than ISO 400 without getting a grainy image. I don't care what the manual or the "experts" say, that's the limit of the D80. I usually try to stay at either 100 (the lowest setting) or 200.

Anywho, yesterday my daughter's 4th grade class was doing something called "Author's Chair" where each student sits in a rocking chair in the school library and reads a story they wrote to parents, staff and other students. I noticed that the florescent lights were pretty bright in the library so I figured I'd try my 50mm f1.8 without the flash and see how it looked. I had the ISO set at 200.

Since my 50mm lens is a prime lens and not a zoom, I was constantly moving around trying to get a better shot. Some of the kids were distracted and my wife had warned me to try to stay in one seat, so I alternated between two different positions and then cropped the pictures after I got them home. I thought the results were not too bad for going flash-less.



The new Canon 5D Mark II reportedly can get up to ISO 6400 without being noisy. The camera is $2700 just for the body. I don't have any Canon lenses so I'd have to invest in that too. Altogether I'd be looking at.......well, I'd probably have to sell my car. For now, I'm saving my pennies and cutting my Starbucks visits.