Wild Bill...

[wingman]

... in his natural habitat.

Birgitta spent a lot of time this year climbing on things to get a different perspective. Sometimes it pays off.

Neal

[darrellmims]

Re: Wild Bill...

... in his natural habitat.

Birgitta spent a lot of time this year climbing on things to get a different perspective. Sometimes it pays off.

Neal

[ATTACH=CONFIG]20293[/ATTACH]

Thats a Great Picture !!

[wingman]

Re: Wild Bill...

Thank you, Darrell! Birgitta is a special talent. She does not much like air racing or airplanes but really enjoys race people. She does not like to think of herself as a photographer, but has an uncanny sense of light and timing. After I muttered a bit early in the week about her stopping the props in some of her photos she never stopped another one.

Most of all she sees well...

[Lockheed Bob]

Re: Wild Bill...

Birgitta has a special talent as her many photos show. Most of us just want photos of speeding planes but she gets the ones that show what air race fans are made up of. Thanks Birgitta.

[AcroGimp]

Re: Wild Bill...

Thank you, Darrell! Birgitta is a special talent. She does not much like air racing or airplanes but really enjoys race people. She does not like to think of herself as a photographer, but has an uncanny sense of light and timing. After I muttered a bit early in the week about her stopping the props in some of her photos she never stopped another one.

Most of all she sees well...

Holy crap that is a great shot!!!

[FuryFan]

Re: Wild Bill...

+1 on the PM shot.....The composition and contrast gives it great depth, almost three dimensional.


Kevin

[wingman]

Re: Wild Bill...

That one really is pretty wonderful. It shows again the joy of working in "bad" weather. That was one of those days with considerable cloud cover with just bits of sunshine coming through. If that shot had been done on a great hot sunny day it would have had a completely different feel. I love the detail in the wheel wells and around the scoop -- all that would be pretty much completely lost on a bright sunny day.

Like I said, the girl has a remarkable sense of light.

Here's one more PM pit shot.

Neal

[Randy Haskin]

Re: Wild Bill...

Both of your photos you've posted from this year have a HDR-ish, saturated quality that I think looks really fantastic.

Are those settings in the camera, or post-production tweaks?

[wingman]

Re: Wild Bill...

It's largely post production in Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw. Obviously the information has to be there in the original file as it comes from the camera, but this modern software gives remarkable latitude in redistributing tones within the image to emphasize what the photographer wants emphasized. I guess there are ethical implications to doing this as extensively as I've sometimes been doing this these days, but my feeling is that I'm not adding anything at all, and generally not removing anything. I feel that I'm just changing emphasis and bringing out what I feel was important about the original scene. I'm gradually learning (after 15 years of doing this in Photoshop!) to do this stuff without the garish overdone look that is so common these days. In particular I try to use restraint with the saturation controls, and rely more on both global and internal contrast controls (including clarity and curves) to go where I feel the image wants to go...

It's important to remember that a photograph is not the original scene -- it's a photograph. No photo will perfectly reproduce what the shooter was seeing when he stood there looking. The camera interprets selectively, and the artist interprets selectively again in post processing. This knowledge is what separates a snapshooter from an artist.

This is probably a lot more information than you were looking for, Randy, but I'm afraid I think about this stuff a lot...

I will say again, that the original image has to be right -- I'm not good enough to create pixels! They have to be there in the original capture, which means the shooter has to be able to see and compose to begin with. Here is the full frame original capture from Birgitta's camera that I started with for the above image. She absolutely nailed her shot, which gave me a fabulous starting point. It's also worth noting that she was not using anything at all exotic in the way of equipment. The camera is eight year old technology (at least three generations back from the latest leading edge) and the lens is a moderately priced "prosumer" telephoto zoom. It's much more important to be able to see than it is to be rich enough to buy the exotic leading edge stuff. As always, the tool user is more important than the tool.

Neal

[wingman]

Re: Wild Bill...

Here's the unedited version of another of the shots in this thread...

[FlyKidChris]

Re: Wild Bill...

+1 on the PM shot.....The composition and contrast gives it great depth, almost three dimensional.


Kevin

Absolutely agree. Even the unedited photo in post #10 is a remarkable shot.