As many of my friends know, I love airplanes and whether it's by nature or nurture my four-year-old son Reed loves airplanes too. Lately his favorite airplane is the SR-71 Blackbird. It's probably because one of his airplane videos shows a SR-71 with lots of fire coming out the back.

When you're four, there's nothing better then a jet that shoots fire out the back.

This year our annual Outer Banks summer vacation took us through the Northern Virginia Dulles area where there just happens to be the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. This is the new annex to the Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is a beautiful museum and features the Boeing Aviation Hanger, a huge building housing hundreds of aircraft. One of the centerpiece aircraft of the museum is the SR-71! Reed was excited and of course I was too.

I had a Kodak V570 with me, a small compact digital camera that has a wide-angle lens and panoramic stitching feature. I will talk more about panoramic stitching in future blogs. Conditions were difficult: A seven-hour car ride, two tired kids, a McDonald's looming in the food court and of course the SR-71 (a completely black aircraft).

The Boeing Aviation hanger is a large dark space with bright windows on each end. The small flash of a compact digital camera just doesn't provide the fill lighting needed for such an open space. I tried my best to steady the camera as well as play with the ISO settings. What ISO controls is how sensitive the image sensor is to the amount of light present. The higher the ISO the more sensitive the image sensor becomes giving you the capability to take pictures in low-light situations. This can be tricky though because a higher ISO often creates more "noise" within an image.

I didn't get technically good pictures, but when your four years old, a picture of you and a SR-71 is a great one and that's really what photography is all about. I printed out the panoramic image and it now hangs in Reeds room. It's pretty cool.

If you are ever in the Dulles Virginia area, the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is definitely worth the stop and you too can see the SR-71.

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