k5083

Exciting picture. Interesting choice of crop. You made it very crowded, which increases the tension and sense of danger and chaos. Had you wanted to emphasize the gracefulness of the maneuver, a wider view, probably horizontal, showing more of the smoke would have been better.

Two? Total Spitfires flying are close to 50, of which 4 or 5 are Mk.Vs like this. Nice minimalist composition though.

 

Martin, I think the b&w version works -- it is basically a monochrome image -- but I find myself preferring the original with its blue cast. Not sure why.

I would bring the tonal range up a little here. Nothing in this pic is truly white, and the Tbirds look best as white against a blue sky rather than light gray. Compositionally, I'm not in love with them being at the leading edge of the picture space, although the placing of the cloud redeems it a little.

Superb picture Dan. Creative idea, nice realization in square format and b/w, great textures and abstract but recognizable composition. This goes in the top 10 airplane pics I've ever seen on PN.

Paying a most welcome visit to New York this evening.

Probably a pic better suited to the traditional 35mm 3:2 aspect ratio than the digital "TV screen" 4:3. That would help remove some of that foreground that isn't doing anything. Slight clockwise tilt is a bit distracting. Somehow the feeling of nostalgia is not quite there. Maybe because the smooth hard runway doesn't look "period" at all.

Yeah, the problem with the rotation is that the clouds in the picture would not form diagonally that way, so it's an immediate tip-off that it has been rotated. Nice plane though.

 

 

These cars appear to have been positioned for display as if there were racing each other. But it is probably much more difficult to capture the sense of this in a photo, as you have done, than when standing in the midst of it.

Very nice picture. In aviation photography we often see prop blur just for its own sake, a silly fetish; here, though, it becomes a real compositional element. I like how the cloudscape and pilot's face are both discernable in the canopy glass. The photo tells a story because you can see (1) who he is (pilot in cockpit) (2) where he's going (sky reflected in canopy) and (3) how he's going to get there (whirling prop). And it works compositionally too with good light/dark play, strong forms and diagonals.

 

Heh! Juha, you make a good point. The norm in this genre is pretty skanky and this one is at least interesting enough to be worth stopping and commenting on.

 

Very decent abstract. Nice colors and I like the 2-dimensionality of it.

See, to me even the babe part of this pic doesn't work. There's a bulge in the front of her leg created by the tight hem of the shorts that ruins that line. The line of her back/bottom is spoiled by the loose waist and big belt sticking out. And her right hand has been cut off by not coloring it. Plus the skin coloring I mentioned before that makes her look like a copper statue, not a girl. Just not flattering. The other pose of same girl with same bike from his gallery is better.

Good points Dan, especially about the color. If the lettering were corrected to white, it would still leave plenty of magenta in the silver areas but with less of a feeling that the photo is tinted.

I think the elevator is just going to dominate this picture no matter what you do. It's so big and bright and has the same colors as a highway warning sign, there's just no taking your eyes off it to appreciate the whole image. Not that I'd throw away the shot or anything, it's actually quite nice, but so difficult to enjoy in its fullness.

Well, I've never seen this composition before, so it gets a point for creativity.

 

There is a certain amount of discomfort caused by the inevitable feeling that the airplane has been caught halfway through the process of leaving the frame, but I can get over that.

 

What it really comes down to is, this picture is divided exactly in half, with half of it being a straight shot of an airplane tail and the other half a sky/landscape. How do the two relate to each other? What is the interaction between them that makes sense of the picture? The composition makes it seem that the B-17 is literally turning its back on the scenery. But what does that mean?

 

Ultimately I'm left not knowing what to think about the picture. If you chopped off the right half and just left the left, then I'd know that you were inviting me to appreciate the B-17 tail, whether the shape, texture, geometry of the markings, or whatever. The inclusion of the right half of the pic makes me think that was not your intent, but leaves unclear what your intent is.

 

... in fact it's really a fairly cliched image. What struck me about it is how it shows that almost any photographic tool has some place in one's camera bag. This was taken with a consumer megazoom camera that has a digital sensor the size of your pinky fingernail. That made it easy, without even trying hard, to get the entire 50-foot length of this bomber in sharp focus even with a telephoto and at fairly close range. It would be difficult to do this with a 35mm-size or even 1.6x crop factor sensor/film, at least without stopping down to the point of needing to think about using a tripod.

I'm not holding this out as Art ...

I'm intrigued as to why you would make an image like this. Why the tilted horizon? Why the awkward pose? Why the metallic treatment that makes the model's skin look like an old penny? Why the halo/vignetting? I'm not saying I don't like the image, more like I can't decide whether I like it until I know something about what the point is.

The photo is okay, but there are at least 100 photos to be taken of that car. I hope you got a lot more, including some a bit more interesting.

A modest effort from the season's first airshow.

The postprocessing is proficient, but I'm curious as to what the point is. Why apply this particular treatment to this subject matter?

 

Dan,

 

Hmm, there is a lot going on in this picture. Composition-wise, it has a few issues. The sunlit yellow/black horizontal stab tends to attract your eye and keep it glued there. I find it difficult to get past that and take in the whole image. Compositionally, there is not an obvious center of interest. The checkers create a lot of lines but they don't lead anywhere.

 

I like the bright yellow but some of the other colors come off a bit too garish, e.g. the magenta in the dirt, the orange in the sunlit part of the flap, the purple in the fuselage and lower part of the sky. Did you boost the sat on this after scanning? If so, a suggestion would be to select only the yellow color channel for pumping up.

 

Not at all a bad picture but complicated! I like the checkertail paint job but I can't help thinking that a plain tail would have made for a less busy and more readable photograph.

 

Very atmospheric shot. I am interested in why you cropped it to slightly vertical rather than retaining the Rollei's square format? For me, when I look at it, it's a little bit irritating that it is almost but not quite square. Do you find the Rollei works well in that environment?

At first I thought this was a picture of a jet turbine engine, which, of course, is exactly what the car's stylists wanted. You did a great job of capturing their intentions with this photo.