Spitfire Mk.IXe

I want one.

Beautifully flown by the now-retired Jerry Billing.

I like the grass in front of the plane, and the low angle you took. It leads your eye right into the frame.

Generally your shots a lot sharper - this one is a little too soft by your standards. Also, the composition... I am assuming you were trying for something, perhaps this was what you wanted... but that grass in the foreground is just distracting and serves no purpose in my opinion - especially that much of it.

At the end of the day, its a Spitfire - I can't be too critical:)

I think that you are right on the money Peter. The grass is a necessary consequence of the low perspective but perhaps I should crop or zoom to eliminate it. The unsharpness is a result of a number of things, to some extent heat rippling off the runway but mainly the fact that this was shot on grainy 1987-vintage ISO 400 slide film and I probably dialed up the grain correction too high on post-processing. I think if I went back to the raw scan I could do better.

 

Yuck... all that pixelography stuff - I would love to see the actual slide!

One thing I noticed (and I think this is a function of the heat effect playing tricks with the way the sharpness drops off, as well as the grass looking alittle larger than life) - it look like a model!

When I was younger I had this masochistic penchant for trying to make pictures of my models look real... they never did. Some of them looked pretty, but never realistic. I am not saying that this is quite like that (obviously this is a real plane), but it reminded me of all those shots of models I took.

Yes, I think you're saying that the pic looks a bit ... synthetic. I understand and agree. I edited this one some time ago during a brief period of self-doubt when the digital guys had me convinced to avoid the "film" look. Since then, I've gotten over it. Embrace the grain!! I'll redo, I'm sure you'll like it better then.

I wasn't necessarily attempting to be negative by comparing it to the model shots, it certainly wasn't meant as a put down, but I guess you're right... it is a little "off".

And never, ever, listen to the digital gurus... they just have too much to prove to be taken seriously (but, but, I am TOO a real photographer!) :-)