• RAB Imaging
    • Portfolio
    • Gallery List
    • Search Archive
    • Lightboxes
    • Cart
  • Search
  • About

RAB's Tip Pad

~ Photographing History, Aviation and People

RAB's Tip Pad

Tag Archives: RC

Aviation Composite Portrait Methodology

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by Rick A. Brown in Post, Shooting

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

airplane, aviation, Color Efex Pro, composite, HDR, HDR Efex Pro, Nik, Nik Software, photo, photography, Photoshop, plane, portrait, post, Post processing, RC

USA, Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park, Composite portrait of man with his RC plane. MR (Rick A. Brown/www.moosephoto.com)

With all the cool stuff I’ve recently posted to my web page, I had a hard decision deciding what to blog about today. Eventually, I decided to describe how I made this aviation themed composite portrait. You may remember, I wrote about this idea here, when it first popped into my head.

After reading and learning the techniques taught in Matt Klaskowski’s,  Photoshop Compositing Secrets: Unlocking the Key to Perfect Solutions & Amazing Photoshop Effects for Totally Realistic Composites and acquiring my studio lighting, I thought that a composite portrait of a pilot with his plane flying over his shoulder would be something fantastic I could offer my clients. So I immediately set upon creating an example piece.

I started with the portrait of my Dad, the RC pilot. This was actually the first serious project I undertook with my lighting kit. I went with a gridded strobe behind and to one side and a bare speedlight on the other side (I currently only have two studio heads.) I then placed a beauty dish without the diffusion sock above and in front. Ratios were set so that the lights behind and to the side were considerably stronger than the front light. Once I got this image into the computer I lightened the shadows considerably, darkened the highlights significantly as well and set the clarity quite high in Lightroom.

 (Rick A. Brown)

Next I decided on what to use as a backgound. I decided to go with this old sunset at Rocky Mountain National Park.

USA, Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park, sunset from Forest Canyon Overlook. (Rick A. Brown/www.moosephoto.com)

This is an image where an HDR image was merged with a standard image to arrive at this image. You can see a more detailed account of that process here. A general overview though, is that I tone-mapped the image in Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. This yielded overall a great image, but I hated how the sunstar looked. So, I picked the original image where I liked how the sun looked the best, layered it on top and then masked everything else out.

Finally, came the plane. This took a while as initially we did not have a plane that looked cool enough, in my opinion. Furthermore, I was initially planning on taking the image of the plane in actual flight and we needed to get good enough to fly the plane at me safely. Well eventually we got the super cool Carbon Cub from E-flite and we figured out a more controllable way to get the image. We hung the plane upside down from monofilament and placed a strobe such that it would closely match the light that should fall on the plane if it were actually flying in the image. Then I placed a fill flash near the camera.

 (Rick A. Brown)

This shot was then brought into Lightroom and processed along the same lines as the portrait.

Then came the actual compositing. I opened all the images in Photoshop and selected my Dad and the plane in their respective images using the techniques of quick select and refine edge as described in Matt’s book. Let me tell you the plane was easier to select, even on the sort of messed up background. I think this is because planes have very defined edges where us Homo sapiens have fuzzy edges with all of our hair and what-not. I output these selections from refine edge as “new layer with layer mask.” I then drug the images into the background image and placed them where I wanted them.

Then came the step of trying to make the portrait and plane look more like they belong there. I started by selecting the mountain and sun part of the landscape and putting that on its own layer and using the Average Blur filter to create a swatch of color. I initially tried the whole landscape, but with all that blue sky, it resulted in gray. I then blended this with the portrait and plane on color mode and adjusted the opacity of the layer so that it only gave the two items a little color. Then I stamped all visible layers to a layer on top, the famous [shift][ctrl][alt][e] shortcut. I then opened Color Efex Pro4 and applied the Tonal Contrast filter on Balanced mode to unify the image and give it a little of the gritty look I wanted.

My final step was to make the prop look blurred. I tried to merge from a photo of the plane running, didn’t like that. So I used Radial Blur in Photoshop. This was quite difficult to get lined up correctly and even now, it sort of looks wonky. Thing is, I like it the way it is now.

Take a closer look at this image and look my entire portrait portfolio.

 

Forming an Idea

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by Rick A. Brown in Shooting

≈ Comments Off on Forming an Idea

Tags

aircraft, aviation, composite, photography, Photoshop, RC

The hardest part of making portfolio level images is coming up with the inspiration for a really cool photograph. So today, I wanted to tell you a bit about one that I have recently thought up, but haven’t executed yet. I will execute as soon as I acquire the needed light modifiers and RC airplane.

My father and I have recently taken up the hobby of RC aviation. I also recently finished reading and running through the tutorials of Matt Kloskowski’s Photoshop Compositing Secrets. One day, I suddenly thought “that is the perfect idea for a portfolio image.” It will look way cool and also be easily convertible into something I could do for clients. Take an image of an RC plane in flight, flying low, slow, and close to me for ease of making a great image. Then photograph the owner against a grey background. Use the shooting and Photoshop techniques discussed in Matt’s book. Finish off the photograph with some lighting and post techniques that are my own. (For the closest idea of what it’ll look like, before I have something to show you, look at the work of Joel Grimes.) Tada, now you have the badass RC pilot portrait.

Look for it soon right here at RAB’s Tip Pad.

RC Aviation Photography

10 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by Rick A. Brown in Shooting

≈ Comments Off on RC Aviation Photography

Tags

aviation, panning, photography, radio control, RC, shooting

I am one that thinks photographers should always be working to improve their craft. Thus, when my father and I started to learn RC aviation together, I viewed it also as an opportunity to improve my aviation photography skills. I predicted that photographing RC planes would help improve aviation photography skills and possibly lead to some portfolio images that might promote my being hired for assignments. (BTW, learning RC aviation is more difficult than predicted and we’ve had to recover our airplane from trees and roofs a few times.)

I’m not yet sure about the portfolio images, but I definitely think it has added learning opportunities.

I recently went to an event of the Keizer Krosswinds and had a blast photographing the aircraft and talking to the members.

There are a few differences with RC avitaion photography. First, propeller speeds are much faster, so you can shoot with higher shutter speeds and still get the propeller blur. The other big difference is that panning is a bit more active, because you need to photograph the aircraft closer to you; they are considerably smaller after all. Other than these factors, it is essentially the same as full scale aviation and thus the practice is transferrable.

♣ Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

♣ My e-book

Insects in a Flash

♣ Another great Stuck in Customs Product

Discover the Art of Photography

♣ Galleries

    Your PhotoShelter xml feed is broken. Remove all non-alphanumeric characters in your image or gallery descriptions in PhotoShelter. Remove all quotes, brackets, dashes, basically anything that isn't a number or letter. If that doesn't solve your problem, contact PhotoShelter and tell them your gallery xml contains errors.

♣ RSS RAB's Tip Pad

  • Floofie and the Secret of Ptolemy April 12, 2019
    Recently I shot with Kira Floofie for a portfolio development shoot at Cobalt Studios. This is a quick look at …Continue reading »
  • Automotive Lightpainting August 30, 2018
    I recently ran an automotive light painting experiment and just posted a video about doing it. 
  • Second Saturday: Veterans’ Day 2017 November 13, 2017
    For today’s blog I wanted to show you all the fun I had at the Veterans’ Day Second Saturday at …Continue reading »
  • Secret Code Map October 30, 2017
    I recently completed a video for B-17 Alliance Foundation. Today’s blog presents the video with some voice over describing the …Continue reading »

Blogroll

  • Laura Crawford Williams
  • Madras A2A X
  • Moose Peterson's Aviation Photography
  • Nature and Photography
  • The Smaller Majority

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Rick's Main Site

  • Moose's Photos

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.