This week sees the run up to one of my favourite weekends of the year - Flying Legends Airshow at Duxford. I'll be at Duxford from Thursday for four days immersion in historic warbird aviation action.

One of the things I'm always trying to do with my photography is revisit previous years. Many times, thousands of photos will be left neglected until I find time much later to review and process them. Often there is lots of junk, pointlessly filling gigabytes of drive space. Sometimes though it is a pleasant surprise to find some real gems.

Flying Legends 2006 was my first with an SLR camera and a fairly primitive (compared to what I use now) Canon 75-300mm lens. Nevertheless the weather was good, with beautiful skies for airshow photography and I was able to get some reasonable pictures. Oh how I wish for conditions like this more often...

Posting galleries of old material is something I hope to do more often and I think the 10 year look back is a good one. In this case it is interesting to reflect on the turnover in the European warbird scene in 10 years. Many aeroplanes have been exported or grounded or lost in accidents - Tigercat, Hellcat, P-51 Princess Elizabeth, Spitfire XIV RN201, French B-17 Pink Lady, P-47, P-51 Big Beautiful Doll, Hurricane G-HURR. But on the other hand we have so much that is new - multiple early mark Spitfires, P-40C, P-36, Blenheim Mk.1 etc. Sheer numbers might be down on 10 or 15 years ago, but quality and variety assuredly is not.

I hope to have time to post a picture or two over this weekend of Flying Legends 2016, but if not enjoy 2006 in the meantime...