See both the museum, and the other galleries that they bus you to on base that contain the presidential planes and the R&D. If you do decide to show up for Dayton, drop me a PM.
Wow... huge thanks to all of you for the feedback and comments. Way to improve a guy's Monday.
There have been a couple of comments regarding my steady hands, but let me reassure you that those rumors are greatly exaggerated. This is all about panning, handheld only because there's just too much vertical and horizontal motion at the same time for any kind of pod. And propeller-driven airplanes need to be shot with shutter speeds of at most 1/320 in order for the prop to show motion, with lower being better and either a "maltese cross" effect (1/160 or so) or a full disc (1/80 or so) being the two best-looking results. Jets can be shot at quicker shutters, but they also move faster.
In the end, my keeper rate for best images is under 1%. A week at Oshkosh means roughly 18,000 frames, of which 16,000 get deleted the moment they hit the computer (a few for missed focus, most for motion blur). The remaining 2,000 get whittled down to about 500 frames that are sharp and have entire airplanes or usable portions thereof. (Note: not all cropped wings are "artistic liberty"!) Finally, I end up with about 100 shots that I'm willing to sell or print large: 0.6% of total.
Anyone can do this, folks. You just have to love photography, love aviation, love spending time in the sun, have at least a 300mm lens (70-300 VR will do if you're out there for fun), and have real patience for the post-processing triage. There are some shooters out there who are more gifted, of course, and some who have been divinely blessed with talent... but the rest of us can have a blast too!
Well, the only time I tried to shoot an airshow, it was overcast on the "main stage" and so I lost a lot of shots due to whites blowing out or sky blowing out So it's a tough job man and you did awesome.
@ Pilgrimatic: the "Mustangs Air-to-Air" thread isn't really a thread, it's an entire community in a thread. I've made several good friends on that thread, with whom we now also interact in real life. Heck, one of them lent me a D300 and 85/1.4 recently when I killed the D3x a few weeks ago. Lots of reasons to love the MATA crowd... but it is a huge bite of images and text, and we do sometimes wander off on tangents. Not for all tastes, of course.
@ 200231786: That DC-3 was a big ol' plane, and in immaculate condition. Very cool to see. I have other images with the registration number, but haven't looked it up. And yes, the factory aircraft had piston engines but many -- if not most -- have been upgraded over the years to turboprop power because the airframe was Just That Good [tm].
@ Ken (fwyflyr): #3 has a classic composition, and I love the contrasting angle of the wings to the smoke. It's one of the ones that I think works best "out of the box" although I'm also very attached to others, like #14 (Show Cat) and #23/#24 (Quick Silver). In terms of "artistic", I think the only one where I definitely created a different image than what the eye could see is #29 ("Stealth"). Love that one...
Baywing wrote:
Great series, what metering setting are you using, matrix, CW or spot?
Just curious as I see that you have + exp comp dialed in and if I did that, I'd be blowing out the whites big time.
Are you using Lightroom, by any chance? If so, I have news for you so let me know... I won't get into that issue right now to save space and time.
First, definitely shoot RAW. You're going to need that highlight-recovery headroom that a JPG won't give you, and you're also going to need the robustness of the RAW because the lighting and DR are just too extreme in many cases. Then, I generally use center-weighted metering because "normal" is a colored airplane against a much brighter sky. Each camera is different, but I can tell you that most of the shots I've shown here still needed a small boost in exposure. I'd have done better with +0.7 or +1.0 EC. Exposing to the right is important
Often a little boost to contrast will recover much of the vivid color. Setting your white and black points is another big deal, but even then you'll find that you often need to bring the sky down a full stop or more to get near-white back to nice blue. A tool often used in LR is the targeted adjustment brush, to increase saturation (gently!) and reduce luminance on the sky. A soft touch of vibrance on the image also helps sometimes.
Do you think it would help people if I went through a typical editing exercise with details? Or would explanations using LR2 simply be too tool-specific?
Rodolfo Paiz wrote:
Are you using Lightroom, by any chance? If so, I have news for you so let me know... I won't get into that issue right now to save space and time.
First, definitely shoot RAW. You're going to need that highlight-recovery headroom that a JPG won't give you, and you're also going to need the robustness of the RAW because the lighting and DR are just too extreme in many cases. Then, I generally use center-weighted metering because "normal" is a colored airplane against a much brighter sky. Each camera is different, but I can tell you that most of the shots I've shown here still needed a small boost in exposure. I'd have done better with +0.7 or +1.0 EC. Exposing to the right is important
Often a little boost to contrast will recover much of the vivid color. Setting your white and black points is another big deal, but even then you'll find that you often need to bring the sky down a full stop or more to get near-white back to nice blue. A tool often used in LR is the targeted adjustment brush, to increase saturation (gently!) and reduce luminance on the sky. A soft touch of vibrance on the image also helps sometimes.
Do you think it would help people if I went through a typical editing exercise with details? Or would explanations using LR2 simply be too tool-specific?...Show more →
Detailed explanations with LR2 would be greatly appreciated if you had the time and energy. I would be extemely interested in your post processing techniques.
Only question, seeing as it was a sunny bright day, any reason why you have such a small aperture and low shutter speeds for this kind of capture?
You are probably talking about the ones with props/helos. I do believe he has explained in one of the posts about shooting props. You need slow shutters so that the props don't look like they're "frozen" and that they're moving (ie makes them look more real). Also some of them you will note have really nice panning, for that you need slow shutters also.
So it's a tough job man and you did awesome.