We know you do it. You look at the photos FC’s judges select each month and say, “Nice shot, but I could have taken it … Nice shot, wish I’d gone to that airshow/airport/photocall so I could have gotten the same photo…” and then, “Holy mack!!! How did he get that shot?!!”

Well, we’re going to fill you in. In the first of an occasional series, we’ve asked some of our recent POTM selectees to tell us the stories behind their winning images. They’ve also shared other photos from the same shoot – and, in some cases, their unprocessed POTM image.

This month, we’ll go behind the scenes on David Jacobsen’s P-51 photo (from August 2009), Dave Cibley’s DHC-6 sunset shot (July 2009), and Mike Riffle’s and Krzysztof Zielinski’s “Wall of Fire” helicopter images (October 2009).

David Jacobsen

As with many things in life, my POTM came about mostly by just being in the right place at the right time. Aaron (Racer11) Haase and I drove to Dayton, Ohio on the Thursday before this year’s Vectren Dayton International Airshow to catch the T-Birds arrival and anything else we could see. A friend had also invited us to visit his hanger at a small airport just south of Dayton to check out Glamorous Gal and other warbirds up-close before the show. So, when the action dried up at Dayton International, Aaron and I headed over. We figured we’d get to shoot some statics, and maybe chat with like-minded people for a while.

After a few minutes of hangar flying, we found out that Dale “Snort” Snodgrass and another pilot were going to make a flyover somewhere in the Dayton area. My friend asked if we’d be interested in going to the end of the runway to shoot some pics while they departed. Gee… a chance to shoot Snort up-close? HECK, YEAH! We hopped into his car, followed Snort to the runway, and jumped out to take our positions.

Dave Cibley

The back-story behind my Twin Otter sunset shot is really pretty simple: the more I shoot, the luckier I get.

I’d been shooting formation loads out of the back of a Shorts Skyvan at Perris Valley all day, and I was wavering about going up at all on the sunset load. The light was bad on the jump-run and the pilots would want to minimize westbound flight into the setting sun for most of the descent – formation flying is tough with a low sun in your eyes. That meant backlight or rear-quarter light for most of this run, so it didn’t look like a promising photo-op. Still, I figured you never know when that one frame will surprise you. I grabbed my headset and hopped in the airplane.

There are no photo opportunities on the ride up (the side windows on the Skyvan are a mess) but once the rear door was open and the jumpers were out I had a clear view out the back for the ride down.

As we descended from 14,000 feet the backlight was, as I predicted, boring. Silhouetted airplanes against a whitish-blue sky: ugly! But as we sank into the LA smog I saw the quality of the light change. Sunsets in inland LA can be stunning because of the smog, so I began watching for some good color in the background. I imagined maybe there would be a silhouette against a solid orange background or something.

As we circled in our descent, I began to focus my attention on capturing the background sky. I switched back and forth between manual and auto modes in case the camera meter was too badly fooled by the direct sunlight. The shot I posted was taken in the auto mode and, despite the fact I had stopped down to f14, it still came in at 1/800th shutter speed. (Why was I in aperture-priority and not shutter-priority when shooting props? Don’t ask!)

The camera was a Canon 20D with a 28-105mm Canon lens at 63mm. (I had my 40D with the 100-400 with me as well).

I’m occasionally asked if I “Photoshopped” the color in my POTM image and I’m always baffled by the question. The simple answer is “Yes” – one often has to override the camera’s color processing defaults when shooting digital. But this shot would have looked exactly the same if I had shot it on Kodachome 64. In fact my goal was to process it as if it were on KR or KM film.

I shoot RAW, and RAW files are just like Kodachrome: there are basically three “black and white” layers that get their color in processing. In film days, I made color choices by choosing the right film before I shot. Kodachrome gave us warm reds, while Fuji and Ektachrome were great for blue skies. For a sunset load, I would have selected the warmer Kodachrome. We could always get more color and saturation from Kodachrome by underexposing it a third or half a stop. It’s a technique made popular by National Geographic magazine and most of that magazine’s fantastic. Warm-saturated color shots were made that way. I’ve always shot film that way as well.

Now that we shoot digital, we have the luxury of making some of these decisions later, on the computer. I no longer deliberate over what film type to use and I don’t underexpose to bump saturation – that doesn’t work with a digital sensor anyway. (It didn’t work with most non-Kodachrome films, either.)

To achieve a “Kodachrome” effect on this shot, I shifted the color temp to warm the image slightly, adjusted levels to get a good dark silhouette of the airplane. (Digital RAW has more latitude than Kodachrome in this respect.) I tweaked the saturation up and down until it looked about like a Kodachrome sunset, and that was it.

But a problem arose: warming the digital image caused the sky to shift toward green. Kodachrome didn’t do that – KR warmed warm colors but left the sky blue. So I had to create a layer mask in Photoshop to mask out the “green” changes to the sky.

After about five minute in Photoshop, I had an image that would have taken me one click of the shutter on film. All of the changes I made in Photoshop were basically to override the computer’s automatic processing defaults and substitute my own corrections. Such is the advantage – and drawback – of digital imaging.

Below is a shot from another flight earlier in the day that might give a sense of the shooting environment and the distance to the trail aircraft. Note March ARB in the background.

By the way, the Skyvan at Perris is an outstanding photo-platform, and is available for rent to anyone needing a great camera ship. It’s been used in a number of TV commercials and feature films (like “The Bucket List”) and it’s awesome for head-on shots! The only limitation is that it’s a bit slow, so there are limits to what you can “park” behind it.

Mike Riffle

Friday, October 9, 2009 at 3:58pm was the moment I knew I was going to get the Apache “Wall of Fire” photo – although it would be another 24 hours before I actually captured the image. I was on location at McEntire Joint National Guard Base for a Fence Check photopit at the South Carolina National Guard Air & Ground Expo. That morning, airboss David Schultz had informed us that Rich's Incredible Pyro had requested a "ridiculous" amount of fuel for the airshow finale. Since I wasn't sure how big the explosion would be, I decided to capture a wide angle shot.

As the last of the flames were dying down, I was already planning my shot for Saturday: two Apaches and a Blackhawk will hover in front of the crowd for two minutes, with one of the Apaches 50 feet to my right. The F-16s will approach from behind for a sneak pass, and as they fly overhead the Wall of Fire will detonate. The helos will be my cue to position myself to the right for the Apache shot; the Vipers, my cue to start shooting.

Fast forward to Saturday. The helos are inbound – time to swap the rented 300/2.8 on my Canon 40D for my 100-400. The helos have come to a hover and I'm making my way to the right. As I'm walking, I start checking my camera settings. First up was the shutter speed – I did not want frozen rotors for this shot.

Suddenly, I hear the Vipers. “OH NO, THEY'RE EARLY!”

There was no time to get the spot I had chosen, so I ran to a position behind some parked vehicles. (In hindsight, this was a better location than the one I had chosen beforehand.) I'm still on the move and raising the camera as the explosion starts. I managed to get six shots off in two seconds. The POTM image was the fourth in the sequence. The EXIF data for the shot: ISO 100, 1/250 shutter, f/9.0, focal length 100mm, quality RAW, Auto White Balance, and partial metering mode. When I posted the image I was on the road with a lousy laptop, so the only post-processing in Photoshop was the crop to remove the vehicle, some sharpening, and conversion to sRGB.

Krzysztof Zielinski

The UH-60 photo that was selected for October’s POTM was shot at the “Go Guard!” airshow at McEntire JNGB, SC. The Fence Check photopit at the show was the best spot for photography one can ever imagine. Our pit was located in front of the airboss’s trailer, not to mention the fence, so there was nothing at all obstructing the view.

My photo was shot during the show’s final performance, a National Guard combined arms demo that included four Vipers, two Apaches, a Black Hawk, two M1 Abrams tanks, two Bradley fighting vehicles and pyro from the Rich’s Incredible Pyro team. It was easily was the best role demo I have ever seen – they even had something that looked like a SAM chasing one of the F-16s.

At the very end, all three helicopters hovered in front of the crowd while the pyro team released their wall of fire. That was the exact moment my photo was taken. I use a Canon EOS 50D, and for that particular shot I had 70-200 f/4 IS lens on. Anticipating what would happen, I framed widely the Black Hawk and held down the shutter button, capturing a burst of RAW files. It has been relatively easy shot: I was in the right place in the right time (thanks to the Fence Check photopit!), I had the exposure preset to a relatively slow shutter speed to blur the chopper’s rotor blades and the appropriate aperture (I shoot in manual mode only), and the camera was in continuous shooting mode, doing 6 fps in burst mode. Postprocessing included leveling the horizon, basic exposure adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw and, as you can from the “before” photos) a relatively heavy crop in Photoshop aimed at having only fire in the background. Although I had to make an eight-hour drive from Ohio to reach the show and could only attend for one day, it was certainly worth it to get this shot.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dave, Dave, Mike, and KZ for sharing their stories with us.

Check back for Part II, featuring low-level F-15s, Lightning-lit Hornets, and more! Meanwhile, you can leave comments about Part 1 here