Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I was at an air fly-in a while back and I caught this shot of a Stearman flying by and thought I’d have some fun getting an old-time look taken of a plane out of gas just before crash landing. All made up. The plane was fine. I had a fast shutter speed that froze the prop. Makes an interesting story, though.
Specific Feedback
Worth the trouble?
Technical Details
D500, 18-200 lens, hand held, 1/3200th, f 8.0, 300mm, ISO 800, cropped to 3521 x 2589, all trickery done in photoshop including cloning out a little runway that was showing at the bottom of the frame.
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Nice work, Dave. For authenticity a slow shutter speed and blurred propeller probably would have been more accurate, but this works fine. I like the slightly grainy look and the monochrome treatment. I don’t know about the crash feeling-these things probably landed on grass as often as not.
Interesting image, and the angle of the plane is great. A slightly-blurred prop might have worked well.
I see you blurred the BG a bit, but there are some areas that didn’t work very well - visible in the larger version. The areas around the wings, lower left especially, are poorly defined. It’s also next to impossible to try to blur the BG seen through the windows.
Nice thought, though!
Nice treatment for this WWII trainer – they did a lot of work subsequently as crop dusters and now they are toys. Looks like he’s in a sideslip (to shorten the approach) and could plausibly be making a deadstick landing (switch off, prop stopped) – these crazy antique pilots love doing things like that. And landing on grass is so sweet.
Good catch by @Sandy_Richards-Brown about the BG, although most if looks believable. Just a little mask tweaking can fix it. Shouldn’t be hard to mask the windscreens – just zoom way in and paint away with a tiny brush.
Columbia?? Not that many other airports around here have that many trees.
Diane-
Hey, thanks for the advice! He WAS in a sideslip, and it WAS at Columbia. He did this dance over the runway (that I cloned out at the bottom) for the spectators. I also cloned out his logo on the tail. This guy takes folks up. He’s out of Columbia. I’ve been up in this plane with him. Flying in an open cockpit biplane was on my bucket list. Good eye on guessing the airport!
Chuck Miller. Ted doesn’t really know him but knows of him. We’ve been there many times, and used to go to the Taylorcraft fly-in there. But since Ted retired he has time to go across the country to a string of weekend fly-ins twice a year so he never makes any of the closer ones.
