Last night I drove to the Pima Air & Space Museum to give a sunset bus tour to a group of football fans here for today’s Arizona/UCLA game. The tour never happened, because my bus didn’t make it to the museum. Six of us signed up for what was supposed to be six bus loads of UCLA boosters, but only the first three buses showed up. The three of us who were to take buses four, five, and six went home, broken hearted, about 7:30 PM. Apparently our assigned football fans never got past the bar at the La Paloma Resort, where they were all staying.
Just kidding about being broken hearted. The real reason I offered to help out was to gain access to the museum grounds at sunset. They lock the gates at 5 PM, well before sunset, and no one is allowed to be on the grounds after that. Every now and then, though, there’ll be a special evening event, and the back gate will be open for staff and volunteers scheduled to help out.
It’s a different kind of light, sunset, warmer and richer. I love the way the photos, which I took with our big Canon DSLR, turned out. Next time–you can bet I’ll be volunteering for other evening special events–I’ll bring a tripod too. Here are two I particularly like (there are more in my Flickr PASM album).
Earlier in the week I wandered into one of the display hangars on my lunch break. I hadn’t been inside that hangar since I gave my last walking tour in July; I discovered they’d taken out the Mitchell B-25 bomber that used to be there and arranged three WWII trainers in its place: a Royal Canadian Air Force Yale, a US Army Air Force Texan, and a Vultee Valiant (aka the Vultee Vibrator) that once belonged to a civilian flying academy contracted to train USAAF pilots. I took some photos with my trusty iPhone 5S and was pretty happy with how they turned out. As before, the rest of the photos I took that day are in my Flickr PASM album).
Shoot, that iPhone camera ain’t half bad.