I have been drawn to warbird images for some time and followed the blog writing on this photography subject by a couple of photographers I track.
This past holiday weekend was an airshow at a local airport. In addition to the static displays, the flying portion featuresWWII warbirds, acrobatic airplanes and in some years some of the still flying WWII bombers.
The warbirds are lined up alongside the closed runway but are tightly packed together. This makes it hard to isolate each and eliminate the surrounding staging areas, barriers, camping and other unrelated objects. Access to the area for the early morning light was not possible either.
The owners of these planes do a marvelous job of shining up their fuselages so the reflections are both wonderful and challenging.
Here are a couple of shots that worked great as black & white images. Some quick adjustments in Lightroom to the RAW file and then exported out to Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2. SEP does a great job converting to black and white plus their Control Point technology adds much finer control to specific areas of an image.
The training aircraft above is an AT-6 (US Army designation) but was also known as a SNJ by the US Navy and a Harvard by Canadians and the British air forces.