Remove Before Flight
On June 24, I drove a short distance to a nearby municipal airport. As it happened, this airport was hosting a vintage themed aircraft fly-in. Having always had an interest in aircraft, I made sure to bring my camera along.
I had a couple of concerns regarding the lighting of the event. As it was hosted at mid-day, the lighting was less than ideal. Harsh top lighting is one of the hardest conditions to photograph, and that problem is only magnified by reflective metallic surfaces and large fields of grass and open sky. My main method of editing these images was to crush the greens as much as I could (as the harsh sunlight made the grass excessively saturated.) I also experimented with contrast and saturation of other areas of the image.
Reflective Surfaces
I wasn’t kidding when I said there were lots of reflective surfaces. This custom built was pure chrome! I like the framing of the airplane with the hangar and elevation marker on the roof.
Piper’s Galore
There were at least a dozen Piper Cubs at the fly-in. One of my favorites was this one decorated with US Army colors. In the background you can see a classic yellow Piper on the runway.
Landlocked
There weren’t just aircraft at the event. There were also two old jeep CJ’s that had been restored.
I feel like I did the best I could have with this picture. The harsh sunlight made it very difficult to photograph things on top of the grass, as the light really over saturated the green. Unfortunately, since the jeep is green, it’s difficult to tone down the green in editing since most of those changes also effect the subject of the photo. I think I struck a good balance here, with enough contrast to make the flags pop but low enough that the grass doesn’t take over the entire color space.
Close up of the machine gun mount!
Experiments in Contrast and Saturation
I took the opportunity to experiment with some different contrast and saturation levels. There was a gorgeous trainer at the event that made for a great subject. In this case, the plane is a WWII T-6 Texan. When I edited these photos, I dropped the saturation on the sky and increased the contrast of the plane. This gives the image a grainy and brooding vibe.
I really like the look. I applied the same philosophy to a photo taken from the tail.
As a counter to these images, I edited an image of a custom built plane with a higher saturation level.
The images have very different moods, but I do really like both of them!
Conclusion
This was a really fun event, and made for some great photography opportunities! It took me a looooong time to get around to finally editing these photos, but I’m really glad I put the time in to do it. I’m very happy with the results, especially the low saturation experiment with the T-6 Texan.
EDIT: As pointed out by Eric Johnson, the silver and red aircraft is indeed a T-6 Texan