Sure, no argument there.

And presumably you weren't using spot metering on the formations?

It does, but how do you avoid completely burning out the sky with this approach?

Probably not, unless he was immediately overhead, which is almost unheard of these days (air show rules changed a lot after the Ramstein tragedy)

It was probably a wingover or a barrel roll.

Not really. Pilots have to fly this close to the ground at least once per flight, so it's not really difficult. He'll be concentrating on flying a few feet off the ground, and that will take care of missing the flags.

The really scary displays are the ones where they do the same stunt inverted (not in a Tiger Moth, though). I suppose you could argue they have a better view of the ground, so it's easier to judge the height...

The twin in #4 is a DeHavilland Dragon Rapide.

It certainly used to be a production aircraft, and there are a handful still flying. I had a ride in one once, around the Cambridgeshire countryside - it was part of an event at Duxford.

If you're interested in a bit of its history, there's a Wikipedia article on it.

Some good captures in that series of pictures. Exposures particularly good, I thought, with good detail visible underneath - hard to achieve sometimes against bright skies.

Marketing in North America must be easier than it is here, if customers pay the brand owner to do their advertising for them.

Yes, me too.

Normally a sky as featureless as this, yet taking up as much of the frame as it does, would make a picture very dull, but the transition from blue to pink from left to right adds just enough interest.

That empty expanse of sky, together with the solitary horse (?) gives a sense of peace and solitude that are most agreeable.

The transition from the enclosure of the bay to the limitlessness of the open sea and sky add to this, and leave me a with a sense of calm. I like it.

I don't like the second one - the beach takes up a lot of the frame and is quite dull, and the knobbly rock thing in the middle has nothing to recommend it in its own right, and it's so dominant that it takes attention away from everything else.

Edit: interesting that the 'knobbly rock thing' is also in the first one. I hadn't noticed it as so offensively dominant in that. Somehow it seems to be present, but by balancing the outcrop on the left where the horse is, it's not drawing excessive attention to itself. Maybe also because it's not so central.

You might try one of these.

My glitch was that the mirror locked up before taking the shot (though after pressing the button!) not after, with long exposures and Shake Reduction on.

The shutter didn't open, (I took the lens off to have a look) and the battery needed removing and replacing to get the camera to reset itself. On replacing the battery and switching on, the shutter opened and closed, and thereafter the camera behaved normally.

No grip in my case.

'Landscape' doesn't necessarily equate to 'wide angle'.

But if you do choose wide angle, I can't see how HDR is relevant.

It's fishier at the wide end than the long end, but it's still fishy to some extent all the way (if I've remembered what people have said that have it - hopefully they'll comment).

For rectilinear (which means that straight lines are straight, not curved the way they are with fisheye) extreme wide angle zooms, there's really only a choice of two at the moment:

Sigma 10-20 (about £300)
Pentax 12-24 (about £500)

AIUI, the Pentax (which I don't have) is very good at the getting straight lines straight bit, although IIRC, one or two have said that it has noticeable chromatic aberration (which is mostly correctable in software).

The Sigma, which I do have, shows a bit of barrel distortion (also correctable in software) at the wide end, but virtually no CA or purple fringing. It's probably not quite as sharp as the Pentax, but the Pentax is a lot more expensive.

I guess you pays your money and takes your choice. Though 10mm is significantly wider than 12mm.