The Dulles museum has always been a great place to try photo equipment for me; it's much darker inside than photos lead you to believe; there are all sorts of different lights at different temperatures (color tones); lots of shiny surfaces and lots of enormous planes that are hard to get all in one frame. The one caveat? No tripods are allowed in the building. This is actually policy for the entire Smithsonian Museum complex of buildings; still photography and video is allowed (with some posted exceptions), but not tripods.
So if you want to take decent photos of the aircraft at the Udvar-Hazy Center, go big with fast glass or go home. Point-and-shoot cameras with twinkie lights don't cut it; I know because I've tried them just to see the results. It's not pretty. The same can be said with any lens slower than an f/2.0, though I've been able to shoot darker images with an f/2.8 lens. And strobes? Forget it. Many of the aircraft have polished surfaces and will mirror the flash right back at you. Bouncing the strobe off the ceiling is impossible, as it's 10-stories high and the length of three football fields -- I don't know of any non-professional portable strobes powerful enough to illuminate a interior space that immense.
For the following shots I had the camera set to aperture priority, auto ISO (between 100 and 2000), the lens was kept wide open at f/1.8, I constantly switched between multi-metering and spot-metering, and I braced against as many things as I could to act as a jury-rigged tripod. As a result, most of the images are relatively noise-free and don't have a lot of body-movement to them. Enjoy.
Boeing 307 Stratoliner -- This is my favorite aircraft of the bunch, simply because it looks so cool. It's also the toughest to shoot because of all the highly polished, reflective surfaces.
Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird -- This was the very first aircraft I ever built a model of as a small boy as it's remained one of my favorites through the years. It's also very difficult to shoot because it's so dark. And it's a huge crowd favorite, so each shot here is the result of patiently waiting... and waiting... and waiting for eager tourons to finish getting snaps of themselves with it and to move clear of my shot lines.
As a comparison, here's a shot I took from the same standing location back in 2004 with a Canon EOS 20D camera and an f/2.8 zoom.
Vought F4U-ID Corsair
Northrop N-1M and Northrop P-61C Black Widow
Arado Ar 234 B Blitz
Republic P-47D Thunderbolt
Horten H III -- This is the precursor to the Horten Ho 229, which I've seen at the Smithsonian's Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Silver Hill, Maryland over a decade ago.
Horten Ho 229 -- These are film scans from shots I took back in October 2002, during a guided tour of the Garber facility.
Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay
Boeing 367-80 Dash 80 -- The famous jetliner that performed a barrel-roll in front of an audience.
The new Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar to replace the old Garber facility.
Space Shuttle Discovery
The original model from the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Mobile Quarantine Facility -- The trailer where the Apollo 11 astronauts spent the first five days after returning from the Moon.
Lockheed Martin X-35B Joint Strike Fighter -- This is an interesting shot that I first took in February 2004 on slide film with a Leica M6 and Noctilux 50mm f/1.0 lens (the bottom image of these three), again in November 2004 with my first "film-quality" DSLR (second below), and now with my current mirrorless digital camera. For people that rave about film and how it's so much better than digital, I beg to differ. When I saw the results from the Canon EOS 20D and how it could produce images that were grain free at ISO 1200 (which film could not), I was hooked on digital and have not looked back. Sorry, guys...
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