Is it a bird, is it a drone … ?

Commando Memorial two views Gary Eason

Two views of the memorial © Gary Eason

Colchester, 29 August 2017

A very well known statue, this: the Commando Memorial just outside Spean Bridge in the Highlands of Scotland. 

Three giant commando soldiers look out over the landscape that was their training ground in WWII.

The statue, created by the Scottish sculptor Scott Sutherland (1910 – 1984) using actual former commandos as the models, was unveiled in 1951.

An earlier photograph of mine created in 2010 is one of my best selling pictures. But the location is one I pass regularly on my forays into the far north and in sunnier weather four years later I made a few more photographs there. 

Striking though the location is, the sheer monumentality of the bronze on its plinth, at 17ft (5.2m) high and on an elevated paving platform, means that unless you stand a long way off then the view of it is very much looking upwards. 

I also wanted to try to get a more eye-to-eye depiction, which resulted in the second of the photographs at the top of this page. 

There are very many photographs of this statue but mine is the only one I have come across that offers this perspective on it. Here's how it was done.

I was on this trip to make landscape photographs so I had not taken along my monopod, but I did have my lovely Giotto GTMTL9271B tripod (which was stolen a couple of weeks later when my car window was smashed).

Onto that went the D700 with 24-70mm zoom set at 24mm, on its side, and the whole package was hoisted at arm's length into the air to get the shot, framed using live view on the rear LCD screen.

Screen Shot 2017-08-29 at 16.04.08
Easier said than done. The camera, lens and tripod combination came to well over 5kg in itself. But this is a very exposed location at the best of times, and what you cannot tell from the sunny aspect is that it was blowing a hooley at this particular time. So hoisting the rig was one thing but holding it steady up there was quite impossible.

Incidentally, if you are thinking a drone would have made easy work of this job, there are two problems with that: I doubt it could have been launched that day because of the wind strength; secondly – I don't have one! 

Screen Shot 2017-08-29 at 15.18.20
So it was a grab: I set the self-timer for 5 seconds, made ready, and hoisted just as it was about to fire. ISO 100, f8, 1/350. I got everything nicely framed and exposed, as the sun dodged in and out behind the clouds, on the fourth attempt, which felt like good going in the circumstances.

Finally however, if you compare the shot and published versions shown here, you can see that I tweaked the lens distortion, warmed up the colour balance – and removed the distracting vehicles from the background. 

For this portrait-shaped view I kept in the remembrance wreaths at the base of the plinth. There is also a wide version where the statue itself dominates the scene. 

I hope you like them. 

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 TO BUY PRINTS  of any of my landscape works please visit the Places galleries on my website.

To get in touch visit the Contact page. Find Gary Eason Photography on Facebook, and on Instagram @gary.eason.

Continue ReadingIs it a bird, is it a drone … ?

Head in the clouds


 Ah, the magic of flight

High Wycombe, 27 Sep 2013 

One of the most important keywords in my catalogue of working pictures is "cloudscape". Searching on that term produces hundreds of images. 

Most – though not all (as we shall see) – are taken from on board aircraft. Yes fellow passengers, I am that sad soul who craves a window seat, preferably in front of the blurring hot exhaust from the engines, and spends much of the journey clicking the shutter button, pathetically trying to shade the lens against the reflections from the double windows. 

You might think I was mildly deranged; you probably would not think that I was working. But for me each flight is a photo opportunity and really there is no such thing as a bad view – in fact ironically, good weather can be the least rewarding.

I am talking about the backdrops for my aviation artworks. The air is the element in which I operate. The more altitudes and angles I have available, the better. Anywhere that passes for southern England, France or Germany is at a premium.

On the rare occasions that an airliner tilts to the side to any appreciable degree, revealing the landscape tableau below, I am in a frenzy. That said, it can mean a long stint in Photoshop getting rid of polytunnels, bright yellow rape fields, motorways and white vans in farmyards – I think I have complained about this before. 

It's all about the light

When I first began making the pictures I was severely constrained by the available canvases and had to confine myself to subjects that fitted what I had in store. Increasingly though it is the other way round.

If I need (say) largely clear air at 20,000ft over the Franco-German border, chances are I have it. I have a growing range of cloudforms and weather moods and it is not too much of a twist to layer these where necessary – combining and blending to build up the sky.

As always the light is the key. If it is supposed to be midday then long shadows are out; flatly lit white clouds at day's end just look wrong. While some tweaking is possible, it is a very uphill struggle to repaint an entire sky so it has to be more-or-less right to begin with. 

Situations now arise where I come back with a haul of skies and cannot wait to get stuck in. A recent trip to Edinburgh (for the Fringe) was a classic example – see video above. Such riches, there and back! I can become almost paralysed for fear I might waste a splendid slab of upper air on an inferior composition. 

Happily, it often works the other way round and an available cloudscape prompts a picture. And it does not have to have been taken up above. My latest creation uses a sky that I shot when squally rain was about to stop play at a 'bagels and baseball' knockabout in the park with some American friends. 

I have used it in a day-for-night way. I'll leave you with … Bomber's Moon: 

Lancasters-at-night-FB

From elsewhere: Discussion of rules regarding photos on commercial flights 

Continue ReadingHead in the clouds

Head in the clouds

 Ah, the magic of flight

One of the most important keywords in my catalogue of working pictures is "cloudscape". Searching on that term produces hundreds of images. 

Most – though not all (as we shall see) – are taken from on board aircraft. Yes fellow passengers, I am that sad soul who craves a window seat, preferably in front of the blurring hot exhaust from the engines, and spends much of the journey clicking the shutter button, pathetically trying to shade the lens against the reflections from the double windows. 

You might think I was mildly deranged; you probably would not think that I was working. But for me each flight is a photo opportunity and really there is no such thing as a bad view – in fact ironically, good weather can be the least rewarding.

I am talking about the backdrops for my aviation artworks. The air is the element in which I operate. The more altitudes and angles I have available, the better. Anywhere that passes for southern England, France or Germany is at a premium.

On the rare occasions that an airliner tilts to the side to any appreciable degree, revealing the landscape tableau below, I am in a frenzy. That said, it can mean a long stint in Photoshop getting rid of polytunnels, bright yellow rape fields, motorways and white vans in farmyards – I think I have complained about this before. 

It's all about the light

When I first began making the pictures I was severely constrained by the available canvases and had to confine myself to subjects that fitted what I had in store. Increasingly though it is the other way round.

If I need (say) largely clear air at 20,000ft over the Franco-German border, chances are I have it. I have a growing range of cloudforms and weather moods and it is not too much of a twist to layer these where necessary – combining and blending to build up the sky.

As always the light is the key. If it is supposed to be midday then long shadows are out; flatly lit white clouds at day's end just look wrong. While some tweaking is possible, it is a very uphill struggle to repaint an entire sky so it has to be more-or-less right to begin with. 

Situations now arise where I come back with a haul of skies and cannot wait to get stuck in. A recent trip to Edinburgh (for the Fringe) was a classic example – see video above. Such riches, there and back! I can become almost paralysed for fear I might waste a splendid slab of upper air on an inferior composition. 

Happily, it often works the other way round and an available cloudscape prompts a picture. And it does not have to have been taken up above. My latest creation uses a sky that I shot when squally rain was about to stop play at a 'bagels and baseball' knockabout in the park with some American friends. 

I have used it in a day-for-night way. I'll leave you with … Bomber's Moon: 

Lancasters-at-night-FB

From elsewhere: Discussion of rules regarding photos on commercial flights 

Continue ReadingHead in the clouds

Aerial views

Action on 31 August 1940 flat4_pr_blog

Battle of Britain dogfight, featuring F/O Harold Bird-Wilson in his Mk 1 Hurricane

High Wycombe, 27 Sep 2012

Alongside my regular photography, taking in trips to the North East, the sailing Olympics in Weymouth and the Edinburgh Fringe, I've recently been putting a lot of effort into my new aviation project, Flight Artworks.

It is currently hosted on my main photography website but my intention is to spin it out into a separate venture with its own clear identity.

One of the responses to the pictures on my Facebook page asked,"Is this a Photograph or computer art?"  Well, given that I shoot and process digitally, you could say everything I make is "computer art".

But I know what he meant. In that sense – no, it isn't. All the elements of the pictures are photographic. They are then combined on a computer, and adapted to a greater or lesser extent as the scenario demands. So in that sense – yes, I suppose so. However I still need the photographs to work from.That picture of the Kent landscape? I took it from an aeroplane over Kent!

Hats off to those clever people who understand 3D software and can carve aircraft out of a block of digits entirely on the computer. But there's more to it than that. Almost all the purely digital creations that I've seen look like what they are. You can just tell. So it does please me when people look at mine and ask, "How has he done that?"

Spitfire Vb in progress_blog

Spitfire Vb in progress

I think a crucial aspect of this is my photographic background. Any photographer is a student of light. Light, not the camera, is the primary tool. What makes a thing look real is the play of light on its surfaces. The corollary being that an unrealistic play of light will make the whole look unreal.

When I think of a scenario I immediately think about how I can find and combine the elements that would be needed to real-ise it. In fact it can work the other way round: having the elements to hand suggests a scene that I might portray.

Half the fun is then in the research. As an aside, although I'm modelling virtually it turns out I have a lot in common with those who work in plastic to recreate past events – who do seem to exhibit a  passion for getting the minutiae correct.

I have also learnt just how easy it is to get it wrong. Spitfire wings? Don't get me started.  Ironically, often the wonderful old aircraft that are still flying around today, thanks to the tireless efforts of those who restore and preserve them, are not at all what they appear to be. 

But that's where the computer art takes over – and makes it possible to recreate them as they were in their heydays.

Everything from changing code letters and registration numbers, to bigger elements such as the cannon and wheel blisters on the wings, armament, props and exhausts – even the shape and size of the nose and cowling.  And in the case of a Type 464 Lancaster (for the Dambusters series), the bomb bay and mid-upper gun turret as well as numerous details such as fuselage windows, exhaust shrouds, aerials and pitot tubes.

I use primarily Photoshop. So, for those familiar with how it works, I typically would have dozens of separate layers going on which makes it easy to tweak various aspects or indeed re-use parts and change the coding or the extent of weathering or whether the guns have been fired and so on. 

 

Continue ReadingAerial views

What do spinning props look like?

Hurricane_scramble_panorama_flat_blog

'Another day': Hurricanes from 17 Squadron RAF in northern France, June 1940

What does a spinning aircraft propeller look like?

You’re thinking I’m daft. Anyone who’s ever seen even an office fan knows what a spinning prop looks like.

Right. It’s just a blurred disk.

So why is it that in almost every photograph you’ve ever seen of a prop aircraft you can not only see but in effect count the propeller blades?

The answer is obvious of course: photographs are a sliver in time and if you are going to catch a moving aircraft without showing it as a blur, you need to have a fast enough shutter speed that it will also ‘stop’ the propeller.

The effect of this will vary with the speed of the prop’s rotation – which in part depends on the different phases of flight – and of course the shutter speed.

So the question that I have been grappling with is: what looks ‘right’?  

Dead engine

I want to know because, in a new departure, I am developing a range of aviation-related digital pictures under the Flight Artworks brand. 

These are photographically based, but the source material features a motley variety of prop rotations – from the total blur (rare) to the stationary (which looks just silly in my opinion – as if the engine has seized in flight).

I found that, to render them into photographic (or photorealistic) backgrounds it was easier, usually, to recreate the spinning prop from scratch. So I could make it look like almost anything I wanted.

I debated with myself whether to mimic the effect of an artfully chosen shutter speed – good blur but with discrete blades visible – which a crack aviation photographer will usually strive for. Think Paul Bowen, for example: http://www.airtoair.net/gallery/gallery-bombers.htm.

Or whether to recreate what you actually would see if you were right there. After all, in a typical air-to-air scenario, where is the viewer? Hanging somehow in space?

After a faltering start I’ve plumped for the latter. In the Hurricanes image above - with the viewer standing on the ground, I suppose – I started with a single prop blade, painted the tip yellow, and spun it into a circle (this worked better than spinning three blades). Then once it was pasted onto an aircraft I resized it and altered the perspective to fit – and adjusted opacity right down. 

[UPDATE: 19 Feb 12]  In response to online discussion of this approach and a review of more photos, I then also added some reflected sunlight 'shimmer'. This needs to be related to the surrounding light but i think it adds a good sense of depth and movement to the props. 

But I’m far from being sure about all this. So comments welcome please. 

Continue ReadingWhat do spinning props look like?

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