Opposing Knife-Edge Pass
Grand Junction, Colorado, 2015
This is without a doubt the luckiest photo I've ever made. The fastest my Nikon will fire while shooting RAW on continuous-high mode is 4 frames per second, which is a photo every 0.25 s. Each jet, though, is moving at 500 mph, so they spend only 0.03 seconds in passing. But getting a shot of them centered while passing, say to within 10%, shrinks the window to 0.003 s, making the firing rate of my Nikon seem glacially slow. Furthermore, the average reaction time of humans is only about 0.2 s with the fastest closer to 0.1 s, still molasses-slow compared with 0.003 s. So, how to nail a photo of overlapping, centered planes during the opposing knife-edge pass? Get really, really lucky. Photo © copyright by Greg Owens.