Challenging Bad Light

I’m always advocating to aviation photographer to “just show up” as opportunities happen. While this works, there are time the photograph that presents itself just isn’t in the nicest of light. Sometimes, the light just sucks! We were at the Vietnam War Flight Museums on Sunday morning shooting and by the time the hangar was unpacked and I could get on the ramp with this beast of a plane, the A-1D Skyraider was bathed in suckie light. While the sky was bald, the background was clean. While the light was suckie it was bouncing pretty nicely into the shadow area. So with all of these combos, I switch the Z 9 to B&W, closed the lens down to get a couple of starburst off the specular highlights and went click. Then in ACR I used the Subject Mask to open up the shadows a tad and bang, I have a photograph. It’s a simple clean shot of an A-1D static I didn’t have in the library and a great start to build on. So the challenge then is to first recognize you don’t have nice light and then pulling from your bag of craft to tools to make lemonade. I like the challenge of challenging bad light!