k5083

That is a nicely presented and effective 2-pic sequence. My only suggestion would be to adjust the brightness so that the sky is the same shade in the 2 pics instead of slightly darker in the second one. That would make it more evident that the two shots were taken just an instant apart.

Nicely caught Gord.

 

I would fiddle with the histogram a bit because the pic has come out rather low contrast and dark, there is very little at the top end of the range here except for the tiny highlights on the wing and tail fillets.

 

Whether the b&w treatment works depends on what you were going for. If you were trying for a period look, it fails. Long telephoto ground-to-air shots never look like period images because the compression effect of the telephoto is obvious and nobody in 1944 used lenses anywhere near this long. If you were trying to emphasize the forms in the photograph without having us be distracted by the colors, it is more successful. The wavy line of the hills and the shape of the aircraft probably are brought out to better effect by the absence of color.

 

 

 

Bill, I know exactly what you mean, I was squeezed into that spot last year! They don't exactly accommodate viewers/photographers at Farmingdale that weekend, do they? There's room for about four aggressive photographers to elbow everyone aside and get a shot; everyone else has to look at their heads. You did well just to get the pics.

It's a nice study. The postprocessing is well done and the colors well matched. The arrangement of masses of the plane is pleasing and the highlighting of the panel lines and rivets helps define the shape of the aircraft and make it 3-dimensional. Good B-17 pic.

The sinuous river and lush colors illustrate your title well. I think perhaps you dialed up the saturation just a bit too high, especially the reds and oranges. But pehaps the slight air of unreality is what you were looking for. Certainly an enjoyable picture.

Nice composition study and the location is indeed unexpected. You chose the right moment for the light to capture the texture in the land.

 

The weathered airplane has great possibilities, but I don't feel compelled by the composition and the bright blue sky takes away from the feeling of decay. Since the airplane itself is basically a study in greys, I might have gone with b&w for this pic. Less harsh lighting would also have brought out more of the texture which is now concealed in the shaded parts of the plane.

There often is an unconscious tendency when photographing taildragger airplanes to tilt the horizon in the direction of making the plane appear level, resulting in a photo that makes it seem to be rolling down hill. You got bit by this tendency in this shot, and to a lesser degree in a few others from the same occasion. When shooting, you have to be on guard about this. If there is enough room around the subject, however, you can rotate the pic about 2 degrees to correct.

 

 

I like it this way. It makes me think of an old Ektachrome. Seriously, a study in blue is the whole point; if you don't like that, you're not buying into the concept behind the photograph. Compositionally, I like the way the diagonal line of coulds continues the axis of the steering wheel. The masses of the parts of the tractor are nicely sized, shaped and placed. I think this is one of my favorite rusty-vehicle shots in quite a while.

 

I see you had fun at Chino, Curt. Good framing on this one. Impressive in the "larger" view, especially.

 

You may be missing the point, Pierre. Imagine this is a wartime base ringed with barbed wire and the bomber is taking off from it. It adds mood and anchors the picture to the ground. Without it the plane is just floating in space, another boring ground-to-air snapshot. As a picture element, the barbed wire lifts the picture just a bit out of the ordinary for this genre.

That is one of the very, very, very few HDR pictures I have seen that doesn't look like a stupid gimmick and that actually has a purpose, i.e. balancing the very different light levels between indoors and outdoors, in a way that looks natural. More to the point, the photo actually HAS a point, which you articulate in the title, rather than just being an HDR exercise. It's a solid photo. Compositionally, I like the horizontal lines and the framing formed by the top of the hangar and by the wing's shadow along the bottom edge. At first I thought you should crop or clone out the black object in the lower right corner but it actually balances the shadow of the port wheel on the left corner. Overall well done.

I like the unusual angle here while maintaining the instant recognizability.

 

Your SnF pics this year show a lot of creativity and a distinctive personal style.

 

Very nice. I am a little bothered by the fact that it is not quite level and not quite centered. Also the brightest part has a slight green cast (PS eyedrop tool says R=214,G=228,B=193). I think if you rotate and straighten this just slightly and correct the brightest part to either white or yellow you have a big winner here.

Setting up so that the rear fuselage appears parallel or inversely tapered and the fuselage and wings form an inverted T shape was creative and interesting. Good clouds, too. The pseudo HDR treatment doesn't do anything for me except make me wonder "why"?

Good use of the national insignia to break up what might otherwise be a monotonous wing surface.

The truck has incredible character and you picked the right weather conditions. Framing could be improved a little. Shifting to the right would balance the composition better and exclude what looks like a distracting modern car roof just visible in the extreme upper left corner. I do like the way you placed the top of the grassy knoll just below the upper edge to create a partial frame for the picture.

Apart from its obvious merits, this picture has beautifully controlled depth of field and nice framing by the prop blade. One could ask to see the girl's face and expression of concentration a little better, but overall a solid image.

Curt, thanks for the nice thoughts. I'm a frequent visitor to your portfolio as well.

 

You bring up an interesting dialectic that we face in experiencing and shooting these old airplanes. One one hand, we can isolate them from their history and purpose, forget that they are weapons and suspend whatever feelings, positive and negative, we have about the events of which they were part, and appreciate them as beautiful objects. Some would question the appropriateness of this, yet photographers do it all the time with other subjects. We shoot pictures of beautiful women without asking if our models just broke up with their boyfriends, have committed crimes, are bulimic or are being exploited by a human meat market. It seems to me that we have the license to do the same with beautiful airplanes, if we choose. And even that in so doing, we may find a kind of truth that is overlooked in the fully realized picture.

 

But then again, we can bring in that history and purpose -- as much or as little as we choose. By "as little" I mean that, without opening the whole Pandora's Box of honor and glory and carnage and slaughter, we can focus just on the age of the machines, how they appear in our world as things out of place and time, things that have no business existing now, and especially still struggling into the air. Or we can open more of the box as I do with this picture and the little story tacked onto it, and use the photo to connect with times and events rapidly disappearing from the memory of living humans but which many of us feel, for many reasons, must not be forgotten.

 

I have a fairly definite view of where every airplane photo I have taken fits along this continuum. There should be a balanced range of them, I think, in any good collection of vintage airplane images. If, that is, the photographer puts any thought into his work beyond taking pretty pictures of airplanes.

 

I like the tonality and the composition, the way the fuselage and the stairs create an arch with a bit of sky peeking through. The soft focus framing treatment is ghastly.

 

Wow, after several weeks of totally undistinguished vehicle pictures, we are seeing some real beauties here just lately. This has beautiful balance of light and color and a true thing-out-of-time feel. Use of the fixtures as a framing device is just right, not too in-your-face. A memorable shot.

I love the abstract composition and subtle color. I might like it better if the lightest parts were brought up a bit, but without compromising the depth of the other colors. Not necessarily all the way to pure white though.

Unusual look for you Dan. Nice handling of a tricky exposure. Were you using a star filter or was it just your lens that gave you those six-pointers on the lights?

In 1982, when I was 15, I attended an airshow that featured three of these B-17s, plus two other Second World War heavy bombers. This was extraordinary at the time. I found a spot near the upwind end of the runway where the aircraft taking off would be clear of the ground when they came by me. I struck up a conversation with the older man next to me, who had come specifically to see the B-17s. He had flown B-17s during the war. While the various smaller aircraft were taking off, he told me of the freezing days high over Europe, how he hated the flak much more than the German fighters because you never could see the flak coming or shoot back at it, and many other things. He enjoyed watching the various World War II aircraft take off for the show, and commented to me on aspects of them that were not the way he remembered them.

He watched the first two B-17s take off in front of us with evident satisfaction. The pilot of the third airplane, named Sentimental Journey, evidently felt a need to catch up with the others to get in formation, and turned tight toward the crowd as soon as it cleared the ground. It seemed to pivot around us on its wingtip as it roared over, and for a moment there seemed to be nothing but its great silver flank filling the sky, while the air vibrated to the pounding of its engines. Then it was gone, rumbling off behind us to join its fellows. After a moment, the people in the crowd whooped and hollered to each other about what had happened. I turned to get my new friend's reaction. But he had none; in fact, he clearly was no longer with me at all. He was in the cold sky over Germany, or on a base in England somewhere with friends long since gone. It was several minutes before he spoke again. When he did he was quieter, and appeared a little shaken. Something had happened to him that he did not expect. He came to see some old airplanes, not to be blown 40 years into the past, to a place and time almost forgotten. He was not prepared to be mugged by ghosts.

I had squeezed off one frame with my lens at 75mm before the bomber overfilled my viewfinder. I was shooting Tri-X, and later discovered that I had forgotten to reset the meter's ISO rating from the 100 speed slide film I had been shooting earlier, so the roll was 2 stops overexposed. I spent many hours in the darkroom with this image. I found that although I could pull an almost normal image out of it with patience, I preferred the high-key version that the negative had captured. It was published in my high school yearbook a year or two later. For a while it became my letterhead image, because of the useful way it can float on a white piece of paper without borders. Although it does not look as good in digital, I find that I keep returning to the image. I feel that I watched something important happen to someone while this picture was taken, something that probably never happened to him again, and I feel that it is important that I remember it too.

In light of {this Philosophy thread about nostalgia}, my question is, is there any nostalgia going on here? Personally, I think not. From what my friend that day had told me of his wartime experiences, his feelings about them were not wistful or longing. He was more than glad that they were over. The war was important to him but he had no desire to go back. As for myself, I cannot feel nostalgic about a time and place in which I never lived; and examining my feelings for the day I took this picture, they are not ones of nostalgia so much as a recognition that on that day I learned something important about the effect that war and old machines can have on people.

Anyway, comments are welcome about any aspect of the picture but I would especially like for the crowd that regularly exchanges comments on airplane pictures to review the nostalgia thread and express your thoughts.

A discussion on {this

Philosophy thread about nostalgia} prompted me to add this photo

and accompanying story.