First off, to those whom I was going to meet at the museum, I'm sorry. I ended up going back over base side Sunday. Several reasons for that, The biggest being that I had an awesome shooting perspective from the Parking area, where I could sit in my truck bed and shoot without anyone in front of me.
It was a great show. I was pleased overall. I wish there had been more Jet demos, but it was a good show overall. Sunday was a challenging day. The clouds did eventually burn off, but the haze was threatening all day. The Thunderbirds started their taxi after their ground show, when the #2 aircraft pulled out of formation and taxid back to the stand-by jets (which were parked about 50 ft. away from me.) and put him in the number 7 aircraft. They said that it was a flight control computer issue, but the maintenance crew said that the ops checked good on it and they pulled the "2" sticker off of it. They finally got off the ground and proceeded with a good show until they knocked it off and headed up to 12,000 ft, and that's when I spotted the lead solo on final with the opposing solo flying high alpha next to the aircraft to keep an eye on her. She taxid back over to the stand-by jets and they got her out of the number five aircraft and put her into the #2 aircraft which they had already put a "5" sticker on. Confusing enough for you?
I heard later that it was a bird strike.

Additionally, Jeremy, maybe you can elaborate on this, There's a big debate over whether or not the F/A-18 demo pilot broke the sound barrier. I didn't hear the pop base side that museum side heard. If he had broken the sound barrier, we surely would have heard it on both sides of the jet. I think what happened was he was at high transsonic speeds and a compression wave came off the aircraft. I've been at Edwards for SEVERAL sonic booms (Space Shuttle, B-1, F-15, etc.) and all of them were startling even when the aircraft is well over 10,000 ft. Low-level would not only have been startling, it would have been painful, damaging, and disorienting. I've also been privy to a few of the compression waves I'm talking about, (F-22 at Nellis from off base, F-16s at California speedway (the Fresno guys, actually)) and, while loud, it's not even in the same ballpark.

I rented a L series 100-400 IS lens for the show, and For some things it was perfectly tack sharp. For other things, it wasn't really any better for clarity then the 75-300 III I've been using. But if you need to rent lenses for any reason and (like me) you don't have a camera shop close by, I can't recommend borrowlenses.com enough. Max and the guys were incredibly helpful (I had to change my rental date about 3 times and they were extremely accommodating.)
I'm going to be posting the best of the work I got. I shot about 2500 frames for three days (Plus, I managed to make it down to San Diego for Red Bull Air Races practice (I was in town with my wife for our 4th anniversary and she was extremely patient.) So I'll post the few shots I got from there as well.
Also, I wanted to address the art theft issue while I'm here. I've been getting paranoid about this issue listening to everyone else getting ripped off. So I decided to do a google search for Atmosphotography (looking for the people who would be dumb enough to leave the file names as they are when they download my shots.) and wouldn't you know it, I found my "Viper Vs. Viper" shot being used for an advertisement on some czech website. I wanted to contact the webmaster, but I can't read the writing to figure out how. So, I'm just going to put watermarks on all my work from now on. I don't like them, I think they're extremely distracting, but I'm trying to make some money with this little venture, and I'm not down with having my work floating around without my permission. So, sorry to those who don't like it. I hope it won't keep you from enjoying it too much, and as always I welcome constructive criticism.
I hope everyone's doing well. Thanks for continuing to watch.

-Tom