Apr 15, 2014 | Aviation
Well, we’re finally back home from Photoshop World, it was a heck of a ride. The 10hrs of travel that turned into 34hrs with mechanical and weather issues (United did a great job with this mess!) isn’t really the story. It’s what Sharon, Jake and I did during the three days in between the end of Photoshop World and travel that was Sooooo amazing! It all started last summer when we first meet the folks from the Dixie Wing CAF and I photographed their SBD Dauntless air to air in WI. It was then we started to plan the Photoshop World Precon and the bill that needed to be paid to make it all happen. Gotta pay to play so to have access to the Wing’s aircraft for Precon, Jake & I shot for three days to create three different magazine articles. Let me tell you how we suffered with this deal :-)
We started shooting Friday just as soon as we left the convention center and arrived at the Wing. The volunteers at the Wing are simply, the best! They had all the aircraft already pulled out of the hangar on on the grass field ready for us. The airport the Wing is located at is gorgeous making static shooting simply amazing. After shooting until long after the sun set, the guys left aircraft in place so we could do an O’Dark thirty shoot. What you see above is the Zero just after sunrise. The guys at the Wing were great, they followed us around in the Tug with three different ladders and would set them up and move them sometimes before we even said anything. I shot all the statics (4357 images in total over the 3 days) with the Df / 18-35AFS or 24-70AFS which does such an amazing job and being small, gets into places the larger D4s can’t but with big image quality. I was saving the D4s for the big event anyways.
We flew two air to air missions, one Saturday evening and the other on Sunday morning. I had the SBD Dauntless, F4U-1D Corsair, Zero & Kate as subjects. What you see above is the Corsair flying top cover for the Dauntless on a bombing run in the So Pacific. This is just one of the 9896 images I kept from the two missions. This was my first photo mission with the D4s which simply was a great, great tool for this! The metering in this case really was great and the AF speed, amazing! Continuing with my new approach to air to air I started last fall (which you’re not seeing here), we flew both missions successfully producing some really special images. Soooo I’m back home getting through all the images so I can get them finished, articles written and all made happy. Other than that, not been doing much for the last few days. Phew!
Apr 11, 2014 | Aviation
We had a marvelous time at our Photoshop World Photo Safari adventure to Dixie Wing CAF. All you great folks really had me hoppin so I didn’t get to really shoot that much. As you know, I went light, just carrying around the Nikon Df / Nikon 18-35AFS but I did take this one image of the Zero which gives me the opportunity to share a little on how I finished it. I’ve posted the steps on my Behance page which starts with the Raw image. You can then click through the 5 steps I used to get to the image above. Thanks again for joining us, cya in Vegas!
Mar 28, 2014 | Aviation
“Planes on a Stick” is what I call those aircraft placed on poles. There are actual books telling us the locations of all these planes state by state, so I’m not the only one whose been sucked into them. Now I don’t go after every single one I see, there has to be a couple of criteria. One is when I’m kidnapped by my best friend Kevin and on this occasion, it was a good time to do planes on a stick. What made it a good time? The direction of the light on the aircraft and the clouds in the sky. Shooting with the Df / 18-35AFS at the Grand Junction airport, I simply walked up to make the shot. Now the gesture of the aircraft comes in part from how the aircraft is mounted on the poles. The rest came from the tilt of the camera when I shot. Other than removing the poles in Photoshop, the images was processed just in ACR. And the reason for taking the photo? Just fun.
Mar 6, 2014 | Aviation
I’m working on a long term project and thought I’d take you along for my latest shoot. We had a rainy afternoon in AZ (the rain was so hard it screwed with our sound recording) inside a hangar and in five hours, pounded out three portraits. The key was the Profoto B1 lights and making use of the ambient light coming through the hangar doors for the fill. Here’s a video taking you through set up and than the thinking behind the placement of the lights. Enjoy.
Gear used in the shoot
Nikon Df
Nikon 24-70AFS
Profoto B1 x2
Profoto Remote
Profoto 5′ Octa
Profoto 1×4′ Strip
Profoto RFi Speedring
C Stand
Lexar 128GB SD
RRS TVC33 Tripod
RRS BH-55
L Plate Df
Mar 5, 2014 | Aviation
Panning is such an essential technique in photography. It is so important, it must be practiced over and over again! When you feel you have a solid panning technique, you need to then push it forward. How do you do that? You find faster subjects and get physically closer to them. I was fortunate this past weekend to have Larry in his “The Ghost” scream by me while I was on the strip to do just this, practice with a close, fast subject. When he’s screaming down at me like in the above photo, there really is no panning happening at all. It’s a snap for today’s camera technology and technique.
Shooting with the D4 and 80-400VR3 as The Ghost came alongside, its speed vastly pushed the speed of my panning action, causing me to swing much faster and really challenging my panning skills. How challenging? You don’t see the broadside images of The Ghost here because I missed the shot, I only captured part of The Ghost as it came directly broadside. It’s simple geometry really. As the subject gets closer and you’re shooting with a longer lens, the speed of the subject passing you by greatly increases the closer it comes. It’s that speed that we need to practice for because some of the great shots with the best blurred background is when the subject is broadside, like this photo of The African.
So why did I capture that shot the day before and missed it the next day? Because I was MUCH closer the second day so when The Ghost went passed, it was hauling ass. The day before when The African went by, it was MUCH further away and going slower. This is all part of the panning game and if you want to win, you’ve gotta practice. Why? There are few times when you can set up the pan, controlling a subject to go by as a set distance and speed like I had with these aircraft (Thanks Larry for the help!). Most of the time, you’re photographing a free wheeling subject, a subject that can do whatever it wants to do. In those cases, you want to nail the photo the first time because you usually don’t have a second chance. Like any game, the more you practice that better you are at playing.
