Few days ago, I had a unique chance to visit a matches factory. It was a very interesting experience to learn, that something could have been easily produced on very large scale already 120 years ago. The light in the factory interiors was really bad, although I put ISO as high as it goes on my D300, most of the photos went straight to trash when I looked at them on the larger screen. From the few which got saved, I prepared this composition.

Couple of weekends ago, I spend two very hot and sunny days at a small, private airfield close to Warsaw. It is a place where air picnic “Goraszka” is organized for last 15 years. It was my first time here, in Poland, and fourth air show overall. After great disappointment after last years’ Airventure, photographically, I must have learned some, because I am quite happy with my images this time. And I wrote down few lessons for the future reference.

1) Airplanes don’t look very attractive from far away. Just look at the two images of glider Solo Fox and see, which one you like more. The glider started the show far above, and was lowering its position during the program, enabling me to take better shots.

In my case, 18-200 mm lens was the only choice I had, and I felt it was not enough. I not only looked funny with this lens on the press podium, where the least “pro-looking” guys had 70-300 mm (or whatever Canon equivalent is). But I also think I could have used those 300 mm to sometimes look through the windshield to see pilots face. And 300 mm would be enough, too. Because on the other hand, filling the frame too much often results in missing pieces of the subject .

2) Airplanes look better when propeller, if any, is shown in movement. Just look at the difference the moving rotor and the propeller makes between those two images of Xenon gyroplane.

It is good to have a basic knowledge of planes or somebody knowledgable with you. I had at least three people in my company constantly whispering – 1/250 for this one, and you are safe with 1/500 for this one, no propeller there. Or you can just make a few tries to see what works and what doesn’t. You just need to remember about the effect. And use Shutter priority mode on the camera.
But…. 1/250 sec is not a fast enough shutter speed for 200 mm, especially if you don’t have a steady hand.

3) Turn on the burst mode, and just shoot as many images as you/your camera/your card can. According to Scott Kelby’s theory, something in the middle will come sharp. Or sharp enough. At the same time, you have a chance of catching the most interesting moment in the sequence of the events. Or just ensure a better composition or cleaner background, as you can see at the two consecutively shot images of landing CSS-13 Kukuruznik.

4) Train your panning technique. With airplane moving fast in front of you, and rather slow shutter speed, you are introducing additional movement with panning, which can result in blurry image. And good panning will give you an interesting photo, like this one of TS-8 Bies over Goraszka airfield.

5) Airplanes look most interesting when photographed from above and from up front. Obviously. Those are hardest to achieve when you watch the show happening in the air from the earth. But see for yourself the difference between those two shots of the most interesting aircraft of this year Goraszka air show- newly restored LIM-2.

6) The continuous focus is probably your best friend in many air show situations. Although it is not perfect, and will be sliding all over the sky, it will often help getting sharper images, especially combined with burst mode. After all, there are fast moving planes in front of you.

7) With shutter speed limited by propeller movement anyway, you can go up with your aperture. I was using the medium apertures from f/7.1 to f/16, hoping to get better depth of field which would help hiding imprecision of continuos focus. Or situation like in the first shot here, where the other plane came out soft in the common flight of Spitfire and Hurricane.

As you can see from the sample images, I made all the mistakes I could, but I learned and trained it all at the same time. I am sure next air show will give me maybe less then almost four thousnad pictures, and hopefully more than 67 great keepers.

A late and short post today. I am working on overwhelming task of sorting through all the images I took this weekend during Goraszka air picnic. I started from 3206 photos, and already culled it to 1665 by removing all out of focus and cut-out pieces frames. But I am still far from having a batch of sharp, well composed and interesting picks. On the other hand, I have my absolute favorite photo.
I got it due to pure luck of being in the right place at the right time. Goraszka is a 2 day even with 4 air shows, which have pretty much the same teams presenting. It was third time Flying Bulls were presenting, and I was not even watching, I was strolling along the sellers booths. I stopped to wait for Tomasz, and snapped it from where I was, getting this ideal placement of planes going in different directions just under midday sun.
I reduced the contrast between the objects in the photo using Contrast Mask technique, which I believe was first used, in wet darkroom, by Edward Weston.

I looked at the series of images I took of this old boat on the lake critically, and they looked so boring at first. But there was some potential. I increases Clarity and Vibrance, as I usually do, but it didn’t fix it yet. And then I noticed, that the water behind the boat had a bluish color, but in front of it, shallow water revealed the yellow sand below. It gave me an idea of using two colored neutral density filters in Lightroom. I have to admit that I was impressed by the result of the quick fix.

You are probably quite familiar with the newest major credit card commercials where they use various objects to resemble a smile? The commercial itself isn’t particularly appealing to me, but the concept of impersonating various items around us stuck with me. So imagine my joy when I saw this red-green face smiling at me while we were out few days ago . I just had to take picture of it. And let Iza play a little bit.

This image was perfect for one thing I wanted to try recently, which is one-image HDR. It was taken from several feet on the very foggy day, so it was seriously lacked contrast. I moved a bunch of sliders in Lightroom before coming up with this idea, and I like the final result.

Few days ago Scott Wyden challenged others with request for unique or fancy bicycle picture. I immediately started to think how to present one of our bicycles in a unique way. The thing that was bugging me is how to present an action. All in all bicycle is quite an action item and taking a picture of it parked somewhere seemed to be so boring. Weather outside ruled out any ideas of outside shot (although this one taken a year ago also fits ‘action’ theme) so I decided to choose another approach. There is one thing on the bicycle that sees a lot of action on it’s own, it’s a derailleur. Especially the rear one has pretty tough job to do back there. So I decided to show it’s while working.

I set up two flashes set into repeat high speed sync function, opened the shutter for 20 seconds and shot the derailleur in three position, low, middle and top gear. The side effect of spokes being lit multiple times also added to the dynamic of the scene.

Last weekend, bored with 4th day of weekend, and not willing to go outside due to wind chill, we decided to finally visit the Antique Car Museum in next town. I guess Tomasz mentioned it on his post few days ago. Although there was a lot of interesting cars (and wagons) in there, seemed like all the exhibits were tightly stuffed into too small space. Not a great place for wide shots, but certainly fun for hours of details. A bit dark, though, and as we left our flash in the car, it was hard to take a sharp image. Some of them turned out OK, though, and it is just one of few of my favorites.

Today we finally went to local Antique Car Museum. Old cars have something that makes me stare at them for hours. Probably it’s because back then nobody cared about them being aerodynamic, efficient, economical (not that there is something wrong with it). They were literally dripping chrome. One of the long forgotten details are hood statues. Here is one found on 50′s Cadillac:

Looks like Spiderman, doesn’t t?

Everybody taking photographs took at least once a night photograph of the cars leaving a light trail. But you can do it with airplanes, as well, and the result is not less stunning. Last weekend, we took the camera, and went to local airport around the time of the largest evening traffic. There was maybe 6 planes arriving and one plane taking off (hey, it was Saturday evening, Iowa ), just enough to have time for some trial and error and a keeper. I know now what I want to do different next time, but I still like this best image from that evening.

We went to our favorite small airport to do some flying yesterday, but the weather was not exactly perfect for cross-country. Not risking getting stuck in middle-of-nowhere, Iowa for undetermined amount of time, we turned around and decided to spend the midday photographic planes rather then flying them. More fun for me, if anybody asks . We saw somewhere around the net the HDR gallery for planes, and wanted to give it a try. Again, we disagreed on the post-processing and artistic concept of the project . Tomasz liked more hard-core HDR, which are a bit too much for me. So I ended up processing resulting 12 Citabria and 19 Cherokee images in two ways, and then finishing them off with two different concepts in mind. But I have to admit, having a lot of time, a lot of point-of-views, made the project so much fun! And why not black-and-white or selective colors? Especially if the yellow plane is competing for attention with yellow grass (man, I really did not notice it until I had final processed images on the screen!). Check it out.