It’s based out of the Kyoto Prefectural Police Heliportin Kumiyama, and can often be seen making (almost) daily flights above the city around 2:00-3:00pm.

Kyoto Police’s other beauty is “Heian”, a Kawasaki BK117C-1, reg. JA6818, which you can see in a nice take off and lowpass flyby” YouTube video, that also includes a good representation of what ATC sounds like in Japan — English ATC directions mixed with flight comments in Japanese.

I’m a aircraft photographer by hobby and a current owner of a Canon 400mm f5.6L and Sigma 120-400mm (50D and 7D bodies) and have been looking quite a bit for anything related to this new ‘BigmOS’.

Gotta say I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen so far on your blog wrt both your abilities and this lens. So thank you very much.

One suggestion I do have (and hope that you can try out to let us now just how good the OS is) is if you do any more helicopter (or prop driven aircraft) shots, to lower the shutter speed right down. Generally I use about 1/200 (no more than 1/250) or less for prop aircraft and 1/125 (no more than 1/160) or less for helicopters to produce a very nice prop/rotor blur. If there’s no blur it looks like the prop/rotor and thus the engine has stopped.

To date I’ve seen some rather varied reports about the OS so I’d like to know that I will be able to use low shutter speeds for ‘action’ shots with aircraft before commiting to purchase and replace the 120-400mm.

Regards

Daniel

I’ve had some experience photographing helicopters and should have known to keep that in mind, but I must admit that my mind was dominated by wanting a fast shutter to overcome the high zoom and softness with the 2× extender. The Bigma’s new OS totally rocks (though can be a bit “swimmy” in the viewfinder). At a dark cafe for cake time with Anthony after descending the mountain, I was futzing around and took a shoot at 1,000mm at 1/10th of a second that’s amazingly sharp. I’ve posted it here…. —Jeffrey