Tag Archives: Flying Heritage Collection

Sturmovik Flies Again

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Locations, Shooting

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One thing in common between two of my great loves in life, birding and aviation, is that seeing the rare stuff is always exciting. Well, there is only one IL2 Sturmovik flying in the world, a newly restored IL2M3 at Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Washington. Thus, I planned to be there to see and photograph the debut from the initial announcement of its existence, almost a year prior to the actual event.

Since I have recently become involved in the International Society of Aviation Photographers and their group on Facebook as well as the Pacific Northwest Aviation Photographers group on Facebook, I intended to try and leverage the accumulated knowledge of these groups to make an attempt to improve my photography of the event. The question that I hoped they could answer was where was the best place to be to photograph the flying. The groups were not at a consensus on this point, but, by what I heard I determined that I would be at the windsock across the field from the museum. I did prefer this spot for the flying, the planes were closer. On the downside, taxiing photographs were essentially impossible due to the distance and heat shimmer off the runway. I also was able to meet other aviation photographers, most notably Jason Fortenbacher, the videographer and editor behind this awesome video about the various flying events at Paine Field.

After shooting at the windsock, I went over to the museum. I wanted to check out any changes since I’d been there last, make some static photographs, and finally I felt that my entrance fee would be sort of a gratuity expressing my appreciation for the event.

The worst part of the photography from the day was the haze from the wildfires in the region. This created white skies behind the aircraft without any detail. I chose to deal with this utilizing the help of some Nik Software plugins; converting images to B&W with Silver Efex Pro2 and Bleach Bypass with Color Efex Pro4. I utilized the controls as best I could to bring out what little detail I could in the sky, but most of all I thought the hazy sky just looked better in these looks.

Take a closer look at my IL2 debut photos.

How to Shoot an Image in France 1940

12 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by in Shooting

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You might find this surprising, but most of creating a shot that could pass for France 1940, is in the process of the shot, not in post.

Find your subject, in this case a Bf109E of the Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Washington. Find an angle that allows inclusion of any details that help sell the illusion, notice the 88mm AAA piece in the background. Then frame such that no elements that ruin the illusion are included. Something like the building is allowable, although I would rather it not be there, there is nothing about it that screams “2011.”

Finally, process it in Silver Efex Pro 2. I use one of the lens vignettes and a sepia tone for my “period” images, always desaturating the “paper” tone. I feel the default makes the whites too orange. Then clone out anything you weren’t able to frame out that ruins the illusion, unless your intended use would make such removal unethical. I only cloned out sensor dust in this image, if you look really closely there is a piece of avionics gear that is a candidate for cloning.

Isolate Your Fw190

01 Thursday Sep 2011

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Fw190 A5 of the Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Washington

For those of you that follow me on Facebook this would be the image that I spent an immense amount of Photoshop time on and I promised I’d blog later about what I did.

Step one was to shoot a three shot sequence for HDR, with two stop increments. Then I opened it in Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. Then I used the presets from Jason Odell and Tony Sweet and used the “natural exteriors 3” and of course made some customized tweaks, mainly intensifying the blacks. I find that most HDRs need a black boost to look real.

Then came the difficult part. This photo was taken at one of the Flying Heritage Collection’s free fly days, Luftwaffe Day to be precise. Thus, there were a ton of folks and other clutter behind the image. So to clean that all up I first started with the quick selection tool and selected the Fw190. I then went into refine edge to use the tools there to clean up the selection a bit more. I chose new layer with layer mask as the output option. I then went to the background layer and used content aware fill to eliminate the clutter. This left some weird spots, so I cloned those out manually. Then I did some lens blur on this background layer to make the next step blend better. Finally, I took an image of some grass around the airfield and composited in on top of the now weird looking line between the sky and pavement. I used free transform to stretch it into position and blurred it a bit to blend better.

Below is the mid exposure shot from the original HDR sequence.

As this is my first attempt with PS work of this type. I know I can do better in the future.

A word about the plane. This is a fabulous rare bird. It is currently the only Fw190 in the world flying with the original BMW801 engine. I suggest you go see it.