What else could or should I do to improve this picture?

[Rob Silliman]

Taken at Sky Harbor - mid morning.

Canon Xsi | 70-300 IS EF lens | no filters | ISO400 | 300mm | f/13 | 1/400 sec

Cropped and cloned out a dust spot above the cockpit, and Enabled Lens correction (in LR3). Color and sharpness seem ok.  What else can or should I do - to make this picture 'pop' ?

[Lynn Evans]

Hi Rob, I played with your photo in LR 3. The settings I changed are-- exposure +.75, blacks +25, brightness +30, contrast +25, vibrance +10, and saturation +10.
I am not really experienced in post processing, maybe Jay or Joe  or some of the more knowledgable processors will weigh in

[jslugman]

A little trick I picked up to see where your extremes of light & shadow are:

In Photoshop, open the LEVELS palette and note the graph. See where your most right-hand spike is a bit from the end? This represents the brightest value in the image (attachment 1). There is a little room to adjust if you like. To find out how much you can make it brighter without blowing your highlights out try this:

Hold down your ALT key and with your mouse hold the highlight slider (white triangle). Don't panic when the image turns all black. Start sliding the triangle to the right LEFT and as you do your brightest regions will slowly start to appear (attachment 2). You can then decide how much you want to brighten those tones, easily reset by sliding the triangle all the way back to the right.

This also works for the shadow end, ALT plus holding the black triangle at the left. Give it a shot to see if it works for you.

[F-16_fixer]

I can't offer too much PP suggestions but I did have one question.  Why did you choose f13 for this photo?  You could have shot at f8 and used a higher shutter speed and lower ISO to help reduce any noise.  Not that it looks bad just curious.

[Jay Beckman]

Just piggy-backing on what Chris mentioned...

Nothing really wrong with going to a little higher ISO.  Most cameras today will clean up just fine at 400 ISO.
It does look just a tad soft to me though as if you ever so slightly over- or under-panned the shot.
However, with the settings you used, you cheated yourself out of a whole lot of stopping power!

Moving up through the reciprocal exposures (in whole stops of faster shutter and wider aperture):
1/500 @ f/11
1/1000 @ f/8
1/2000 @ f/5.6
1/4000 @ f/4

Because you're fairly far from the jet and more or less perpendicular, depth of field isn't really critical.  At least not f/13 crictical.
Speed up your shutter a couple of clicks and open up a couple of clicks the other way and I think you'll see crisper shots.
Bonus: Shooting at larger apertures = less noticeable dust spots!

As for the processing, you're suffering from what we see a lot of in AZ which is weather that's clear, blue and a million.
You might try adding just a little bit of a dark to neutral gradient from the top down to introduce a little dynamic in the sky but it really cries out for nice clouds.
It would be pretty easy to replace the blank sky with one that has more "oomph" if you were so inclined.

Great paint scheme and well worth shooting!

[Rob Silliman]

Thanks everyone for the comments.  I will give some of the exposure suggestions a try my next time out.

- Rob

[Paul Dumm]

Panning, the only way to get good is to take a lot of photos and work on it. Much harder if it has a prop too. any tip??

[Joe Copalman]

Even if your panning was rock-solid, this might still not be a keeper due to lots of heat-haze between you and the aircraft.

As far as panning goes, I try to lock my center autofocus point center-mass on the target aircraft, then try my damnedest to keep it there as I track the motion of the aircraft.  Using a feature like a wing root or a window is typically good practice as well, as long as it's near the center of the aircraft.  You may need to ride the zoom a bit to keep the nose and tail in frame on larger aircraft.

[Paul Dumm]

Thanks Joe, that was what I was thinking. The heat-haze never came to mind, one thing you get a lot of living in Arizona.