Last weekend I got to travel to Fort Worth, Texas, to attend the Red Bull Air Race World Championship at the Texas Motor Speedway, and needless to say, it had a lot more to offer than just free energy drinks:
This event is a collection of some of the world's top pilots, most expensive beverages ($7 for a glass of lemonade...), and of course, lots of advertising for Red Bull (because it gives you wings, duh).
The pilots fly upwards of 200 mph, experiencing accelerations of over 10 times the amount of gravity, at a mere 40-60 ft off of the ground as they navigate in and around a course of giant pylons to compete for the fastest times. If I had to describe it simply: It's kind of like watching NASCAR...except it's with airplanes and it's way, way cooler.
I had to use a shutter speed of 1/4000 of a second (the maximum capability of my camera) just to capture clear photos as the planes flew by, and by the end of the two day long event I had taken over 2,400 pictures. I only kept 9.
This photo is probably my favorite out of them all. Each of the competition planes was retrofitted with a GoPro-esque camera on its tail to provide an (almost) live feed onto the jumbotron. Here you can see the fraction of a second delay between the actual flight of the plane and what the "live" view is showing. Note that the pilot is traveling at 159 mph, and experiencing 2.5 times the acceleration due to gravity at this moment, which, compared to other areas of the course, was like child's play.