Candids at the Air Show

alexf

2009 Homestead Air Show (FL)

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6.

rutt

Very fine B&W portraits. Got me wondering about the lens, so I looked at the exifs. Looks like you kept zooming in more, true? B.D. stresses getting close with a wide lens, but I love the bokah with longer focal lengths that you are getting in the portrait of the woman.

The first one looks like it is probably a natural for my favorite B&W conversion technique to get a more dramatic sky. Have you tried this? You may need to use a pretty aggressive surface blur on the red layer.

alexf

rutt wrote:

Very fine B&W portraits. Got me wondering about the lens, so I looked at the exifs. Looks like you kept zooming in more, true? B.D. stresses getting close with a wide lens, but I love the bokah with longer focal lengths that you are getting in the portrait of the woman.

The first one looks like it is probably a natural for my favorite B&W conversion technique to get a more dramatic sky. Have you tried this? You may need to use a pretty aggressive surface blur on the red layer.

#1, #2, #3 shot with Nikon D80 + 18-70mm lens

The other ones shot with D300 + 80-400VR which I was using for flight shots.

I'll study and try your method. These (B&W) were done with Silver Efex Pro, but I sometimes do B&W in CNX2 myself by blending.

rutt

alexf wrote:

I'll study and try your method. These (B&W) were done with Silver Efex Pro, but I sometimes do B&W in CNX2 myself by blending.

I'm thinking #1 might be a textbook case for layering red over green in darken mode. I'm trying to pull together examples for a B&W workflow tutorial. Would you like to let me see what I can do with it starting from raw (or color jpeg, for that matter.)

alexf

rutt wrote:

I'm thinking #1 might be a textbook case for layering red over green in darken mode. I'm trying to pull together examples for a B&W workflow tutorial. Would you like to let me see what I can do with it starting from raw (or color jpeg, for that matter.)

Sure. Here's a color version. I'd like to see your take on it and learn something.

rutt

I started a thread in the Finishing School to show examples of my B&W workflow and this is the first example.

alexf

Good job! I'll continue in the new thread.

bdcolen

alexf wrote:

2009 Homestead Air Show (FL)

It's unfortunate that this has become a technical discussion, with little consideration of the, um, photographs.

This is a nice collection of casual portraits, and you've done a very solid job of dealing with what was obviously hideous lighting conditions. But...Only one of these images says "airshow" to me, and that's the last one - a very nice shot. (I realize that there are parts of planes out of focus in the background in a couple other shots, but...) Anyway, if the idea is to show that these are people at an airshow, or next time a dog show , I'd go for greater depth of field.:D

alexf

Thanks for the comments. I did not got for the airshow theme but for the candids. It happened to be an airshow. Could've been anything else, I did not care.

As per the wider angle, it was very crowded. Next to to impossible to isolate a person. In #1 I was so close I could almost touch him. And yes, the light was bad that day. I had to throw many of my flight shots away due to poor lighting conditions. Still working on processing a few keepers.