I recently ran an automotive light painting experiment and just posted a video about doing it.

A long time ago I read that if you can produce a full text/photography package, that will help you immensely in the editorial photography market. I have been writing magazine articles for a long time, and I believe a majority of the images I’ve licensed have been part of full article packages.

This month has been a particularly good one for me in this pursuit, having two articles published in major aviation magazines; Sport Aviation and Warbird Digest. As part of the experience of these two articles I have found a way to make the writing process even easier, conduct interviews. Interviews do several things, they help get others involved, they usually lend a better air of authority to your article, and the thing I liked best – the interviewees are bound to give you many ideas to add more content to your article.

My suggestion to you is conduct an article if your writing project is at all appropriate for one.

I have been doing the majority of the research for my book on Oregon aviation history at the Oregon Aviation Historical Society. In the process, I’ve gotten to know many of the people there pretty well, leading to many things, including my first editorial assignment.

Recently, a Murphy Rebel, a small homebuilt plane was donated to them. They want to sell this aircraft to fund the restoration of some of their other aircraft and they asked me to take some photographs of the plane to help them in that endeavor. The Rebel is a pretty good bush plane, so they came up with the idea of photos that made it look like someone was camping out of the plane along a river. So we set up this whole scene with a tent a fold-up chair and a picnic basket. It created a scene that looked pretty darn cool.

I had an idea for a photo that didn’t work quite as planned, but is still cool. The idea was to put CTO on a flash and set the color balance on the camera to tungsten. Then I would underexpose the ambient light and properly expose the flash. My speedlight wasn’t powerful enough for the scene to look as I’d hoped, but it still looks pretty cool.

Serendipity came in when one of the board member’s dog thought that under the plane looked like a pretty good place to rest. Initially, we tried to convince him to move, but eventually decided that he adds to the photos.

I had been at Pearson Field to do some photography for an aviation history project I am doing. Right next door is Fort Vancouver and with my interest there was no way I was going home without stopping by the fort.

When I walked in to the blacksmith shop I immediately saw the potential for this shot and was very excited about it. It took ISO 6400 to make it work, but that didn’t bother me that much as I felt I could use significant noise reduction without it damaging the shot relative to look I wanted. The light was such in the room, overall very dark but with a window or two and the fire, that I expected to have almost this look straight out of the camera. However, my 5dII handled the shadow detail so well in this instance that what I actually got was this.

Therefore, I started with this image in Lightroom increasing contrast a great deal and darkening the image especially the shadow a lot. Then I opened the image in Color Efex Pro4 and ran the Bleach Bypass Portrait recipe. The Bleach Bypass filter needed a little customization in brightening the image a tad, but that was all the customization necessary.

Here is a gallery of the rest of my Fort Vancouver Images. All are available for wall art and editorial licensing, some are available for all uses.

Last year, I attended my first Hood River Fly In and had a fabulous time. Since then I have become more involved in WAAAM, so this year when the Fly In rolled around on September 7, my dad and I split a volunteer job. The coordinator for the event, Ken Olsson, had mercy on me an assigned us to a job that would allow for lots of photo opportunities; we were to sit and one end of the taxiway and make sure people did not walk on the taxiway. As it turned out, we also ended up doing a lot of other things. We helped push planes to and from their parking spots, and for a brief time I even directed the aircraft traffic.

It was a lot of fun. There is definitely a good feeling associated with this sort of work.

I must admit there were some downsides to the day; it was hot for one. The bigger downside is about an hour into our time there a CF card failed on me and I lost all of my early morning shots. We arrived just as the sun was cresting the ridge to the east of the museum, so they were some images with fantastic light. These are my only two complaints about the day however.

Overall, I’d say I enjoyed the 2013 Fly In even more than 2012. Most of my favorite planes from 2012 returned, plus there were some new ones I dearly loved. For example, there were two Howard DGAs there, two Lockheed Electras, two DeHavilland Beavers, and a Ryan SCW.

Take a closer look at my 2013 Hood River Fly In images, or take a look at my aviation portfolio.

I promised that I’d be back to talk about the environmental portraits.

In the planning and run-up to doing this shoot I was very excited about the environmental portraits. They were not the primary reason for the shoot, those were the stunts, but I felt that we could do something really cool with these. I feel that the results bear that prediction out.

For the most part, I was aiming for the same kind of impression with these images as the stunt photographs; a larger than life, heroic look. The sky helped a lot. My part in that equation was to shoot low with my 24-105 at its widest setting and fairly open apertures; I shot the majority of the portraits at f/5.6.

I did the post processing pretty much the same as the stunts and I detailed that pretty closely in the previous entry, so I won’t bore you with the details again. I would like to point out that with a shallow depth of field it is pretty important to control the Detail Extractor filter in Color Efex Pro4 pretty carefully as it looks strange applied to out of focus things.

One challenging part of this portion of the shoot was I tried to get some family portraits that had the heroic feel and captured some family interaction simultaneously, producing one of my favorite photos. I’ll let you decide if I combined drama with the family interaction well.

I love doing this sort of shot and one of my fantasy gigs would be to get an assignment to go to the Reno Air Races and photograph the racers in front of their planes in this style. Can you imagine a photo of Steve Hinton in front of Voodoo done in this style?

Check out my portrait portfolio or the entirety of the skating shoot.