Nikon Owner Issue 15
Nikon - Moving At The Speed Of Sound
Ensign John Gay of the US Navy captures a technically meticulous shot of a plane breaking the sound barrier which originally appeared in Issue III.
Through the viewfinder of his Nikon camera, Ensign John Gay could see the fighter plane drop from the sky heading toward the port side of the aircraft carrier Constellation. At 1,000 feet, the pilot dropped the F/A-18C Hornet to increase his speed to 750 mph, vapor flickering off the curved surfaces of the plane. At that precise moment a cloud in the shape of a farm-fresh egg formed around the Hornet now 200 yards from the carrier, its engines rippling the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below. Gay heard an explosion and fired his camera shutter once. "I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I knew I had it," he stated.
What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound barrier being broken on July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific between Hawaii and Japan. Sports Illustrated, Brills Content and Life ran the photo. The photo recently took first prize in the science and technology division in the World Press Photo 2000 Contest which drew more than 42,000 entries worldwide.
"All of a sudden, in the last few days, I've been getting calls from everywhere about it again. It's kind of neat," he said in a telephone interview from his station in Virginia Beach, VA. A naval veteran of 12 years, Ensign Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned to take intelligence photographs from the high-tech belly of an F-14 Tomcat, the fastest fighter in the U.S. Navy. In July, Gay had been part of a Joint Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way to Japan. Gay selected his Nikon F90S, one of the five 35mm cameras he owns. He set his zoom lens on 300 mm, set his shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second with an aperture of f/5.6: "I put it on full manual, focus and exposure," he said. "I tell young photographers who are into automatic everything, you aren't going to get that shot on auto. The plane is too fast. The camera can't keep up." At sea level a plane must exceed 741 mph to break the sound barrier, or the speed at which sound travels. The change in pressure as the plane outruns all of the pressure and sound waves in front of it are heard on the ground as an explosion or sonic boom. The pressure change condenses the water in the air as the jet passes these waves. Altitude, wind speed, humidity, the shape and trajectory of the plane - all of these affect the breaking of this barrier. The slightest drag or atmospheric pull on the plane shatters the vapor, and creates oval-like fireworks as the plane passes through. "Everything on July 7 was perfect," he said. "You see this vapor flicker around the plane that gets bigger and bigger. You get this loud boom, and it's instantaneous. The vapor cloud is there, and then it's not there. It's the coolest thing you have ever seen."