March Air Museum, Riverside CA

[Joe Copalman]

'VARK IN THE DARK


NIGHT HOG


Such a great night at March last night.  Thanks again to Kevin for the invite and to Byron for hosting us!

[Jeff D. Welker]

^^^^ Very nice work Joseph - as I anticipated. You are a light painting wizard sir - nice a balanced across the frame. An impossibility for me.

Sometimes things just line up like I planned it that way. Welker dumb luck in action. I've got to send a thank you note to the folks at March AFB for placing that single light just right  

FACING THE DAGGER

[Jeff D. Welker]

I dunno what the heck it is, but it's weird and looks pissed off  

[Scott Youmans]

Lockheed D-21 drone.

[Scott Youmans]

NIGHT HOG
Love that F-86H. The beefy Sabre. Great lighting on a beautifully marked jet.

[Joe Copalman]

^^^^ Very nice work Joseph - as I anticipated. You are a light painting wizard sir - nice a balanced across the frame. An impossibility for me.

Thanks Jeff, loving your shots so far as well.

The 'Vark is actually a composite, which is a bit of a 'cheat' that I use.

One of my biggest night photography pet peeves is 'splotchy' light-painting, where the bright hot-spots and dark cold-spots look marbled, almost like the subject is underwater and the light is being filtered through waves.  I try to do my 'brush strokes' in a way that yields a balanced exposure - more time shining a light on a dark nose and a distant tail, less time on the forward fuselage and wing leading edges. 

In this case, both of the back-to-back frames in question were too 'splotchy' for my liking, but going back and forth between them, I could see that between the two of them, I had a much better 'painted' subject.  Opened one up in Photoshop, opened the other one up, copied it, pasted it as a layer over the first one, selected "Lighten" at 100%, and BOOM.  Got what I wanted.

[Joe Copalman]

NIGHT HOG
Love that F-86H. The beefy Sabre. Great lighting on a beautifully marked jet.

Thanks Scott.  Easily one of the most attractive F-86s I've ever seen.  The H is a favorite of mine as well, with that huge intake and those 20mm cannons.

[Joe Copalman]

A-XED


One thing that is abundantly clear at the March Field museum is that you are absolutely, 100%, no way around it, going to have to deal with the very bright sodium-vapor lights from the ramp on the other side of the airfield.  As you can see with mine and Jeff's shots (and Ken's and Kevin's and Damon's on Facebook/Flickr), embracing it and going with the flow can and did work well. 

But for some shots, I decided to try and neutralize it, and I did it by switching my white balance to 'tungsten,' which results in a much cooler exposure.  The problem with doing that is that anything white or gray in the image will have a strong blue tint to it.  To work around this, I took a warming gel that came kinda-sorta close to matching the amber-cast of the sodium vapor lights, and I placed it over the lens of my powerful LED flashlight.  I used this to illuminate the A-9 while I was shooting it, and the result was an image in which the sky was much cooler - not blue, but a sort of warm violet - and the aircraft's colors were fairly close to being neutral.  A quick application of the white balance tool in Lightroom using the brightest spot on the white nosecone did the trick. 

[Jeff D. Welker]

I concur on the excellence of that F-86H. Sometimes size does matter...

LAST [THUNDER]STREAKS OF SUNSHINE

[Jeff D. Welker]

I just noticed that in my travel weary haste to post some images from this fun trip, I was posting them the size of billboards - sorry. I've adjusted to a more reasonable size.

Here is my take on the gorgeous and robust F-86H. Taken just as the sun was disappearing.

DOES "H" STAND FOR "HOG"?

[Joe Copalman]

OLD 97

[Jeff D. Welker]

^^^^ I love the offset you employed on the "OLD 97" image Joe. You nailed the exposure and the pano crop works beautifully. Well done sir.

[Joe Copalman]

Thanks Jeff.  This was the last shot of the night, the one I was just setting up when I got the call from Ken saying everyone was done at 9:37pm. 

[Joe Copalman]

COLT OF PERSONALITY


This An-2 has a fairly interesting backstory.  It was owned by a local restauranteur who would fly it to Mexico to pick up fresh seafood.  Apparently the owner was killed by some shady characters down there, and it took a lot of legal wrangling to get the plane back to the US.  Our OUTSTANDING escort Byron said that every now and then, lawyers representing whatever criminal syndicate laid claim to the plane after taking the life of its previous owner will show up at the museum trying to make the case for turning the airplane back over to these shady characters. 

[Jeff D. Welker]

The communications and navigation appendages on the topside of a Beechcraft C-45 Expeditor. I spent some enjoyable time photographing different angles and POV's of this Beech. More to follow...