Fishing expedition to NUE and a super exotic catch

My Saturday's visit to NUE was what I call a fishing expedition: there were no interesting airplanes in the schedule, but I hoped that something interesting will show up anyway. I didn't have time to make my own lunch pack, so I dropped by Der Beck and bought a jalapeno bagel.

Normally, I avoid buying sandwiches in local bakeries. Not because they are not good, but because they come with industrial quantities of butter. And I usually have to scrape at least two spoonfuls of the stuff to make whatever I bought edible. This time, however, I was in luck: the bagel was fresh and soft, there was cream cheese instead of butter, jalapenos were perfectly spicy, and the whole thing just tasted good. But I digress... where were I...? Ah yes, airplanes!

My bet on catching something exotic paid off. Walking by an area for parking private single-engine aircraft, I noticed an unusual biplane with an interesting livery. Disappointingly, it was all but impossible to take a decent photo of it because of the fence. But my excitement rose to unprecedented levels when I noticed on Flightradar24 app the airplane taxiing to the RWY 28. Fortunately, I was wielding my Nikon D800 with the Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM | C lens. Otherwise I would have had no chance of capturing the tiny machine.

When I returned home, and looked up the airplane's registration N101BJ, I discovered that I managed to catch one of the rarest machines out there: Christen Eagle. There are two versions of the machine: Christen Eagle I and Christen Eagle II, and I captured the latter. What this exotic airplane was doing in Nuremberg of all places is anybody's guess.

Full-resolution JPEG ad RAW

Even though I zoomed all the way to 600mm when capturing the biplane, I still had to apply heavy crop in post processing, so I ended up with a 4.5MP final image. I decided to give Upscayl a try. It actually did a surprisingly good job of upscaling the source JPEG to 18MP. I've tried several upscalers before, but I always walked away thoroughly unimpressed. Not this time, though, and Upscayl definitely deserves a place in my photography toolbox from now on.