Its cause of these things!

Yes, a few backstage photos. Not all the pictures I take are for artistic and commercial purposes of course, sometimes it's just for the fun of it. But I never get to show them to anyone... so why not use this blog to share some of them? I think it's a supercallifragilisticexpialidocious idea!

Starting with something scary. Has anyone actually seen what a worm looks like? Until a few days ago I thought they were just hundreds of rings, I never even thought about their eyes and mouth. Fortunately, I found a baby one in my backyard and had with me my supercallifr... my wonderful macro lens! So here's what I got:















(You can click to make it bigger.) Scary stuff. Looks like it was taken from an "Aliens" movie.

On other news, today was the practice day for the pilots of the Redbull Air Race, which will take place tomorrow and Saturday, in Porto. Thousands of people are expected to show up, and I will certainly be one of them. Despite the fascination of having planes flying at 200kmh just above my head and slaloming by the Douro river, the challenge of photo-shooting such an event is my greatest invitation. And today, the pilots were practising - and so was I.

I have shot and covered a few sport events - but no one was ever this HARD. It's almost impossible for me to shoot (correctly) an event such as this one, at least not with the equipment I have. The planes are too fast, too close, and too unpredictable. I wanted to take close ranged photos of them and I was totally unable too, they were just a motion blur! And I was shooting at speeds as high as 1/1000 of a second. It was incredible.

Even at 4 frames per second at 1/1000s, I didn't manage to get any close shot. It's well beyond my possibilities, so I just put my camera away and enjoyed the rest of the show. Here are two shots, so you'll know what Im talking about:

















The rush is amazing, a bit scary too. So I guess this is it for today.