Tag Archives: Tillamook Air Museum

Madras A2A X

30 Saturday Aug 2014

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I finally did it! I finally flew in a light plane. I finally photographed some planes air to air. What do I plan to do now that I’ve achieved these goals – work towards doing a whole lot more of it.

Several years ago, I read an article in Digital Photo Pro about aviation photography. Aviation photography had long been a field that I was interested in pursuing, but knowing that professional level aviation photography usually requires some special access I had no idea how to go about it. This article gave birth to a kernel of an idea of a way I might be able to make it happen.

This made me hyper alert to any further information I ran into online of ways I might be able to make this happen. I saw several things online early on that inspired me that this may be possible. One of the key items was there are actually workshops out there that teach photographers how to do this sort of photography. Here it was the key thing that would allow me to demonstrate ability in the field in a method that the only thing I needed was money to make it happen.

Unfortunately, money was in short supply and I had to let several opportunities pass me by. I was afraid every time that the opportunity might be my last. Finally, when 2014 rolled around, I received word that a friend, Lyle Jansma, was arranging an event known as Madras A2A X in conjunction with the Erickson Aircraft Collection. Here was the best opportunity yet. It was closer to home than any of the others, reducing travel costs. It was with a collection with which I was very familiar, although I knew them as Tillamook Air Museum up to that point. I was determined that this time it was going to happen.

I threw together every dime I had. I discussed the issue with family and mentioned that for the time being I’d prefer a contribution to this venture to any birthday, Christmas, etc., gifts. Together, we made it happen.

The night before the first flight was quite interesting. I couldn’t sleep to save my life. I was very excited about the next morning. I was also scared that I might be very frightened by aspects of flying in a light plane, most notably, sitting in the open door of the plane in flight. Turns out, none of this scared me when I flew. In fact, I found that there’s nothing like flying in formation with a couple of warbirds while skimming along the tops of the clouds. It is beautiful and strangely peaceful. (Ok, it’s also dang cold, but well worth it.)

In addition to the absolutely incredible flying – first hop with an FM-2 Wildcat and F4U-7 Corsair skimming the clouds in the late morning, second flying close formation with two incredible aerobatic pilots in the late afternoon, and the final hop right at dawn with a P-51 Mustang and a Focke Wulf FW190 replica) – we had lots of fun on the ground. There was the grand opening and dedication of the Madras Maiden party, several lunches with the group, and finally a real cool bbq with the airshow crew to close out the weekend.

Now it’s time to get back to work incorporating aviation photography into my editorial/commercial photography business, where I specialize in people, the cool things they do, and the machines that help them do it; in simpler terms, portraits, planes and cars.

I’d like to thank the organizer Lyle Jansma, our instructor Scott Slocum, and the pilots Scott Slocum, Brent Conner, Mike Oliver, and Greg Anders.

Please check out a bigger selection of my images from Madras A2A X or my aviation portfolio.

Workshop Fun

13 Sunday Apr 2014

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As someone seriously pursuing professional photography, photography workshops are a bit different. If I had the money and was an amateur photographer, I imagine I’d be going on a ton of them. As a pro, I believe in continuing education heavily, but the selection process gets much more stringent.

The first selection criteria, is the workshop teaching something I really need or want to learn and I think I’d do much better with some hands-on learning than an online course or something. Also, the ability to arrange the hands-on training without paying someone else comes into play.

The second criteria; does the workshop have arrangements, such as special access to subjects or travel plans that it’s certainly worth it to pay someone else to arrange rather than set it up yourself. An idea that is similar to hiring a producer for a commercial shoot.

From these criteria, I certainly haven’t participated in many workshops, but when I have, they have been fantastic experiences.

The most fun thus far, has been my trip to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. This trip was light on the instruction, assumption was that participants pretty much knew what we were doing. There was an instructor available for any help needed, but it was a freestyle setting. At the time, when I was a part time photographer and full time food quality lab technician, my focus was wildlife photography. I’ve always loved history though and thus, the combination of the great seabird photography with the history on the island was very exciting.

The days were full of excitement, yet very relaxing. We’d get up before dawn and walk over to the Clipper House, a nice French bistro themed around the Pan Am Clippers that made Midway the second stop on their flights across the Pacific. The food was fantastic and the service friendly and humbling as I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone work as hard as the two ladies that worked the dining area. Then it was off to shooting. The wildlife was so easy to find and approach that we were able to fulfill any plans we made within an hour or so, thus we came up with a lot of different ideas to try in a week’s time. Then lunch would roll around, so it was off to what used to be the old Navy mess hall. Here the food was a choice of typical American, such as Hamburgers, or authentic Sri Lankan cuisine. I tried a lot of different fabulous curries.

After lunch, most of us took a nap through the harsh light of midday. Then we finished the day off with some more shooting and dinner at the Clipper House immediately after sunset.

All of this shooting and eating fun was topped off with great times with a bunch of people with similar interests, but diverse backgrounds. We had a WWII Navy fighter pilot, a woman who watched the attack on Pearl Harbor from her yard, and a Swedish woman who was not at all interested in photography but was there as she wanted to bird Midway but thought photographers would be better company since she wasn’t a lister. We even ran into the Secretary of the Navy who was on a tour of ex-Navy bases in the Pacific. It was fascinating to listen to one of his bodyguards, a fighter pilot during Desert Storm, swap war stories with the WWII fighter pilot in our party.

Now, my big plan for this summer is a different sort of workshop; Madras A2A X. This is a workshop to teach us some of the skills of air to air photography and provide a general experience built for photographers at a local airshow. It is heavier on the education than my earlier Midway trip; fortunately since I need to learn some things about planning shoots like this and related safety issues.  Since I’ve become a full-time photographer my focus has shifted more to vehicles and people and photographing them together, so this is well targeted. My favorite vehicles are definitely vintage aircraft.

The second slide show here is from the Airshow of the Cascades from 2013, the workshop will be built around the 2014 show.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing I suggest you strongly consider this workshop. If you’d like to see some images from our instructors and organizers, the Facebook fan page for the workshop is a great place for that, https://www.facebook.com/madrasa2ax.

The Airshow of the Cascades Experience

29 Thursday Aug 2013

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Airshow of the Cascades Video from Rick Brown on Vimeo.

On August 23 and 24, 2013 I attended the Airshow of the Cascades in Madras, Oregon. To give you some idea of how much fun this was, let me start by telling you the only negatives to the experience. We’re sitting out in the sun a lot, so obviously one needs to wear sunscreen. We figured that it wouldn’t last all day, so my dad started to reapply and the spray bottle broke. We were unable to get anymore sunscreen out of the bottle, so the part of my face the sun hit from about 2:30 until the end of the show got a bit burnt. The other negative was when I was sitting my camera down on its lens hood to rest, some tiny little wasp decided the hand grip to my camera was a good spot to rest. Thus, when I went to pick it up to take a shot I got stung on my ring finger. Fortunately, the poison of this type of wasp is either less effective or there was less compared to a honey bee and the pain subsided in about ten minutes.

We left our house in Keizer, OR around 10:00am on Friday and drove up I5 to 212 and then got 26 to go the rest of the way. This made for a pretty good start to our day, 26 is a picturesque drive going through Government Camp and offering fantastic views of Mt. Hood. This also coincided with the Hood to Coast relay race, so we were able to witness some of this big event on our way.

We arrived in Madras around 1:30, giving us some time to relax in front of the TV in our hotel room before grabbing a bit to eat and being at the airport at 4:00pm when the gates opened. I hadn’t been to an airshow in a long time and had never been to one held around the sunset hours. It was really cool to see the performances in the nice light of sunset. It did get a bit dark for aviation photography, but with a little of Lightroom’s noise reduction, it all turned out alright. The show concluded with some fireworks. I’m not a big fan of fireworks, but had always wanted to photograph them. This opportunity led me to discover that what I wanted to do with fireworks was surprisingly easy. I made a shot about ½ hour before the fireworks started to capture some color in the scene to serve as my background. Then when the fireworks started I used bulb mode to capture several bursts. In post, I processed both images separately for good color in Lightroom and then loaded them into Photoshop as layers in one image. I put the fireworks burst shot on top and changed the blend mode of the layer to lighten, this dropped everything out but the fireworks themselves. I had moved the camera a bit in between so I applied free transform to the fireworks layer to tweak it to where it lined up to where it should be. Then I merged the layers down and applied a Color Efex Pro4 Glamour Glow.

Saturday was an early morning to get there when the gates opened. This was fantastic for static and taxi shots in the morning light and limited people wondering in and out of the shots. I also met some of the photographers I knew from the Pacific Northwest Aviation Photographers group on Facebook and it’s always nice to meet these folks in person rather than just on Facebook (in the video you can see me shaking hands with one of these gentlemen.) Saturday was an intense day of shooting culminating in a wonderful photographic event the “Wall of Fire” pass of Tillamook Air Museum’s B17 “Chuckie.”

The result of all this has been a group of photographs that I stare at more than I’ve stared at my photos in quite awhile.

And of course the one I stare at the most, that “Wall of Fire” pass by “Chuckie.”

Brent Conner flies Tillamook Air Museum's B17 "Chuckie" past the "Wall of Fire" at the Airshow of the Cascades. (Rick A. Brown)

Take a look at my aviation portfolio or my images from the Airshow of the Cascades.

Northwest Classics at Tillamook Air Museum

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

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Flyins can be great photographic opportunities but there are some challenges to overcome. Recently, I went to the Northwest Classics show at Tillamook Air Museum. This show is a combination flyin/cruise-in.

The show opened at 7:00 am with a charity breakfast. I drove to the museum and arrived a bit early, we hung out at the fence at the tarmac for a bit, photographing some of the planes. Then at around 7:00 we went in for breakfast. After breakfast, we paid our entry fee and entered the museum.

This is where the fun began. Many planes were pushed out on to the tarmac and for the show we were allowed to wonder around the tarmac. Usually, the tarmac is roped off with a sign saying that only those taking the Guppy tour are allowed beyond. Photographing planes is almost always better outside.

The time on the tarmac brought another new experience for me that I feel is important that all photographers handle well. I was there to photograph the aircraft for the purposes of building portfolio materials for trying to get assignments and for personal use. I am eventually going to redecorate my office and I’m pretty sure I’m going to use one of those Jug photos on the wall. Anyhow, there was a team of photographers from Aerocapture Images working an assignment at the same time. In my estimation, it is a very important point of photographers’ etiquette to not interfere with other photographers when they are working an assignment. Thus, I made sure that I worked other aircraft on the tarmac at a distance from where they were working. Of course, I also didn’t want to pass up the chance to photograph the P47 in morning light, so as soon as they finished for the morning and started cleaning-up, I raced over to the P47. The best photo I made of the P47, some of their flash cables were still there, but with content-aware-fill that was a super easy clone job. I also wanted to meet these guys; I had become aware of their reputation through many sources, and we had already been Facebook friends for a while. The gang stopped by where I was shooting on their way to breakfast and we had introductions and a little small talk, nice guys. (You should check them out, at Aerocapture.com.)

One thing that was a bit odd that day and a little unfortunate is the light seemed a bit harsh for the time of morning it was. I don’t know what was the cause of that, but for less than two hours after sunrise the light certainly seemed a bit harsh while I was photographing the P47. This is often one of the challenges that can come from flyin/airshow photography. The shows usually occur fairly close to noon, unfortunate for photography. The other problem with airshow photography is there are often distracting elements that are hard to eliminate from the photograph, sometimes they are downright ugly elements. The usual way to deal with this is to close in for detail photos. This wasn’t too much of a problem at this show. Often this can be a way to tell when a photographer was working with the aircraft owners on assignment vs a grab shot at an airshow. If the image is a whole aircraft image with a complimentary instead of distracting background, there is a good chance the photographer had the full cooperation of the aircraft owner (obviously, this isn’t 100%.)

One of the coolest things about access to the tarmac was that if you planned for it you could photograph taxiing aircraft from very close. A very new experience for me that was very enjoyable. In the end, I liked the images this produced, but not quite as much as I thought I might.

In conclusion, it was a very fun day. The biggest problem was that from my warm-blooded perspective, it was very hot that day. To escape the heat, my father who usually serves as my assistant was camping out under the P47’s wing for shade.

(Rick A. Brown)

On a day like this, his usual assignment is to take production shots for me to share on social media platforms. On this particular event though, he made an aviation image that I love so much I am showing it off to everyone along with my own photos.

Pilot refueling PT17 Stearman at Tillamook Air Museum (Rick A. Brown)

Take a closer look at my Tillamook Air Museum images from the day, or my Aviation Portfolio.

 

Aviation Post Processing

05 Thursday Jan 2012

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I recently purchased Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro4. I knew that one of the things I wanted to do with it was to create a recipe, to create a modern post processing look with my aviation photography. Turns out, I came up with three, once you get started making recipes in the program, you can’t hardly turn back.

So on to what I came up with. In the end, there were times I wanted the look to be more subtle and other times I wanted to take the saturation completely in the opposite direction. Now, I’ll explain the three different recipes.

BTW, if you want to see these planes in person, go to the Tillamook Air Museum.

This first method was the one I knew I wanted when I started. First in the recipe is the Bleach Bypass filter with the “increase detail” preset selected. Next I apply the Tonal Contrast filter and finally the Detail Extractor. When applying the Tonal Contrast and Detail Extractor I use control points to prevent them from being applied to the background.

In the end, it turned out that I used this one the most often. It is simply Tonal Contrast, followed with Detail Extractor. I then use the Brush funtion to paint the effect only on the aircraft. Sometimes I will paint with different opacities on different parts of the plane, usually at the highes opacity on the engine. I love it when the cooling fins on the cylinders of the big radials are clearly visible.

Grumman J2F-6 Duck of the Tilamook Air Museum (Rick A. Brown/www.moosephoto.com)Finally, there’s this method that usually looks ridiculous on the planes, but occasionally looks really nice. It is intended to be a bit over the top. It starts with Brilliance/Warmth, goes on to Tonal Contrast and finishes off with Detail Extractor. Again I use control points to keep the Tonal Contrast and Detail Extractor off the background.

Can you tell that I like Tonal Contrast and Detail Extractor? These two filters are worth the price of the plugin by themselves. I often use them by themselves as well. Detail Extractor is quite adept at producing an image that allows you to see detail in the shadows and highlights without looking like a heavily post processed image.

If you look in my aviation files, you’ll also see that many of the images have nothing more done to them than Lightroom sliders.

 

 

Fan of Photography

28 Wednesday Dec 2011

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I have always been a big fan of certain other photographer’s work. As I enter another type of photography, it becomes even more important to me. So now, I am entering portrait and aviation photography, so I am more intensely following a few photographers as I learn the skills of those fields.

In aviation photography, I am intensely following the work of Moose Peterson, and Phil Makanna. Phil Makanna is one of the old masters and Moose is reasonably new to the field but already has a great deal of expertise. I hope to  train with Moose at his Air to Air workshop. In fact aviation photography was a field I was always interested in, but didn’t see any path to doing it prfessionally. After following Moose, I see a potential path. Admittedly, it’s a long shot, but risks are always necessary to achieve anything great. Above, is a gallery of my recent shoot at Tillamook Air Museum; see if you can see the influence of these photographers in my images.

In portrait photography, the photographer that I most feel the fandom thing is Joel Grimes.  Maybe, I’m a bit strange, but in portraits the two styles that I like are either the ultra-modern look of Joel Grimes’s current work or the real retro, as in the ’40s or ’50s look. As I start building my portrait portfolio, you’ll definitely see that in my work.

One thing that always seems a bit odd to me, is buying things from other photographers when you are one yourself. But, I do. I recently received Phil Makanna’s 2012 Ghosts calendar and am looking into one of his most recent books. I also hope to attend one of Moose’s workshops.

Personally, I feel that if you do this photography thing seriously, you probably love it. Thus, it’s totally natural that you’ll be following other photographers.