Sometimes, well actually most of the time photographing aircraft is a hit and miss affair.. many things can work against you getting a good shot; where you are, where the aircraft is relative to you, the type of aircraft, the weather etc. I have always struggled with capturing the spectacle of formation flying and in particular the mass flypast, a photograph seldom seems to capture the scale of the enterprise, so with this summer's RAF100 flypast over London I decided to take a different approach.
On the 10th July the 100th Anniversary of the Royal Air Force was celebrated by one of the largest flypasts seen in decades with over 100 aircraft representing nearly all of the operational types in service flying over central London, according to the Metropolitan Police, an estimated crowd of 70,000 people watched the event.
Before the flypast I used my iPhone to capture a panorama of Green Park where I was observing from making sure I capturing the large crowd there.
Then for each component of the flypast (a dozen or so) I took photos using my usual long lens set-up making sure I captured the aircraft in different positions across the sky.
Back home I created the mosaic, treating each of the flypast components as separate adjustment layers in Photoshop to produce the image above.