May 8th is the 70th Anniversary of the WWII VE Day and a huge celebration is happening in DC. Part of that is the massive aviation flyover. There’s more WWII aircraft flying than can be listed here. They have just announced this and the website is up for you to learn more. We’ll be there, hope you can be too!
The Ford Tri Motor ushered in commercial flight that today we take advantage of daily. Here’s a nostalgic look back at this glorious form of flight. The video was shot with a Nikon V2 (by Sharon) and the air to air with the D4s / 80-400.
I’m always looking for ways to make the common, uncommon in my photography. It’s the ol editorial desire to make someone stop when they turn the page and look. One easy, quick, cheap, simple and effective way of doing this when there is nothing else is the starburst. When I started photography with steam powered cameras, you’d have a number of starburst filters in your camera bag. To this day I have no idea why we would buy them when you can do it for free. It’s real simple, close the lens aperture down to its smallest hole (biggest number) and put a point light source (like the sun) in the picture. Bang, you’ve got a starburst! The one problem though with this method is, the starburst is always determined by the location of the light. What if you want that glint of starburst off the front tooth of your favorite super hero? What if you want that starburst to pull the eye to a particular point in your photograph? What if you want a cooler than cool starburst and not the garden variety starburst? This means you must control that starburst and that’s where the “Pinch” comes into play.
The starburst we are creating when we close our lens down is the light bouncing its way through that small hole and “flaring.” Well we can actually intensify that “flaring” by constricting the light even more. This is what I call the “Pinch” and three examples of it are here. The first is the rising run on the horizon under the wing of a P-51D Mustang. I was lying on the ground and moved laterally to my left to squeeze or “pinch” the sun off the edge of the landing gear (D4s / 80-400) intensifying the starburst. The next shot was in Yosemite of the fall color at sunrise. The backlight of through the leaves was essential but I wanted to suck you in. So by moving right and going down, the sun is being “pinched” by the limbs creating the starburst (D750 / 18-35AFS). The final photo of the Zero ass shot, the sunrise was, well, on the blah side and the background almost as dark as the silhouette so the subject merged. By waiting a few minutes until the sun rose, getting down and to the left, it was “pinched” by the fuselage / wing and a starburst was born (D4s / 24-70AFS).
Now understand that these three examples without the starbursts would be at best, solid photos. They would not be stand outs and more than likely, not ones I would be posting. They have solid attributes but are really just common photos. In other words, anybody walking by could have gotten the same basic photo. They are just common. Taking them to the uncommon side of common meant including not just a starburst, but a starburst that grabs the mind’s eye to a certain point in the photo and the rest of the elements then taking the eye through the frame. The “Pinch” is a real simple technique when you remember to do it (and have a clean front element) and use it to make the common, uncommon.
I meet Clancy just eighteen months ago in front of the plane he flew in WWII. We hit it off right away cause we had one thing in common, photography. This is the first portrait I made of him. When I finished a few seconds later, I went up to him to thank him. He said, “nice light, you worked the nice light well.” As I was setting up make this shot, Clancy was telling me story after story the entire time and he had a lot of them. In fact, he didn’t stop talking while I was shooting which was a hoot. And we’ve been talking ever since! Many of the iconic WWII Pacific photographs we see today are Clancy’s as well as so many more. An early aviation pioneer, original AOPA founding member, there wasn’t much in aviation Clancy hadn’t done.
We talked a number of times since our two days at Osh together, our shortest phone conversation was thirty minutes. We were to meet again in August to make another portrait with a plane he flew in the ’30s but he couldn’t make it, being ill. Clancy passed away Christmas day, he was 93. I will miss our talks. God Bless.
So have a moment to myself and was lookin at images from a month ago. I don’t post many shots of jets in part because I don’t have that many that really say flight. I have lots of images of jets, but they just don’t say visually they are flying. What does it take, at least for me, to have an image saying a jet if flying? Well one of the first things I need in the photograph is a background. Blue skies by themselves just don’t cut it for me. Next there is the light. You might think light should be the first and it is, it’s the reason the camera went up to my eye in the first place. But in communicating flight for jets, it needs a little something extra to bring across the illusion of flight. I say illusion because it is a still of a moving object.
I’m shooting with my normal rig, D4s / 200-400 and since I’m shooting jets, I’m in Aperture priority. In Aperture because there is no prop to blur. So rather then concentrating on the prop, with jets I look at the background and light. The top photo of the F-100 expresses it pretty well cause if you know the F-100, it’s one loud plane! And the Blue Angels, like wow, not like there’s not a thousand photos of them. Shooting them then, I not only look for what I’ve already talked about but more. I go for the really low percentage shot by shooting them really tight and from an angle not normally used. In this case, I went up, not shooting from the ground but from a perch 30 feet off the ground. Na, these aren’t the best shots but they were fun to go after and fun to look at a month later. Simple clicks just passin by!
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Panning in its most basic form, is moving the film plane in sync with a moving subject. This synchronization nullifies the movement of the subject as far as the camera is concerned so we have effectively, frozen a moving subject. This is a very old technique and for it to be effective, as far as rendering a sharp, frozen moving subject, it must be practiced on a continual basis. I’m talking about a minimum of once a week in order to make it a took in your arsenal that will serve you whenever you need it. This is basic, human, muscle memory training which is what panning boils down to in its most simplest terms.
But just capturing a sharp image cannot be an in point to our photograph. Panning is a technical tool is reduced to this and what the world needs is not more technically perfect photographs, what it needs are more with passion. We must push our craft past that to panning becomes a means to art. These photographs of a MiG 15 are an example of what I’m talking about. Shot on a gorgeous day at the Wings Over Houston, is was gorgeous for three reasons. The sky was a great blue and it had great clouds all being brought to life with gorgeous light. Shooting handheld with a D4s / 200-400, the shots are no accident. I put myself in position so when the MiG made its pass, the gesture of the MiG was set against that sky, the color making the clouds pop out with the light bringing it all to life. Yes, panning is why the MiG is sharp but moving past the technique and to the art, panning is what brought all those elements to life in the photo. Push your technique so it is the building block to your art and then your photography will take life. Panning is more than a technique, panning is art.