Thanks for hanging in there – this is the last of my posts on the WWII Weekend.  I wanted to try and cover a lot of ground with them, since there was so much photographic skill and technique that’s useful in shooting an event like this.  I’m not hardly scratching the surface of it, and goodness knows that I’ve still got a lot to learn and hone down myself.  But hopefully it’ll be a starting point, or even just an inspiration, for someone out there.

To wrap up, I want to forget about all the technical aspects for a moment, and focus instead on the artistic.  It’s all too easy to forget that photography is art, to get caught up in the gear and the settings and the technique.  And while all that stuff is important, it ain’t worth a hill of beans if you aren’t using it to create art.  It’s one thing to go to an event and take snapshots – it’s another entirely to put all your skills, including your artistic ones, to work and really make an image.

This is my favorite image from the day.  It’s perhaps not the most exciting photo ever taken, but I see it as being a bit timeless – I defy you to find anything in the photo that tells you when it was made.  As far as I’m concerned, there could be a Marine at the controls, coming back from a training flight before shipping out to Iwo Jima.  And there’s my story: another plane returns, another mission survived, another good landing to walk away from.I don’t talk about post processing much on here, and honestly it’s not something that I spend a huge amount of time on.  I feel I’ve got a pretty good handle on Photoshop, I can tone and adjust my photos to my liking, and I can even get a bit tricky sometimes.  I just don’t like to – I’d rather have a good image out of the camera, instead of tweaking it until it’s more digital art than photography.

But in cases like this, it’s worth going a bit beyond the norm.  For starters, the sepia duotone just felt right – not only in this photo, but in many from the day (as you’ve probably noticed).  That’s partially because of the old-timey look, and partly because it helps make the subject pop a bit more.  Nothing fancy here – just a conversion to greyscale, then a duotone, with a Pantone preset chosen out of the color range.  Some curves after than, and a conversion back to sRGB.  The rest – the soft BG, the heat waves coming off the runway, the haze in the sky – were all there when I shot it.

How about this?  You know it’s a cool event when they’ve got an FDR impersonator!  Roosevelt and his entourage are standing in the doorway of a DC-4, just before the President made an address to the crowd.  I’m shooting from the flight-line here, a few rows back from the fence, with the 120-400mm racked all the way out to 400.  This photo just begged for the sepia toning; it wouldn’t have looked right in color.  My only gripe is the microphone – it’s too obviously modern, and I wish they had gotten a period-looking one to use.

This one takes it a step farther.  Shot it again with the 120-400 @ 400mm.  One of those moments where I saw the shot, kicked the camera up from the hip, and took it just before someone wandered into my way again.  It’s candid and it’s rough – and not all the roughness is “real.”  This is one of those very rare occasions where I pulled out some extra PS tricks.  For starters, instead of trying to maybe clean up at bit of the ISO 500 noise, I added grain to it.  WWII era photos tend to be grainy, so why not?  Then several layers of toning: shadows & highlights to unblock the shadows just a touch, twin curves layers for contrast, some high-pass sharpening at very minimal levels, and some subtle dodging & burning.  So maybe I spent 15 minutes on just this shot – it was worth it to end up with something that, I think, looks kinda’ authentic.  My only regret is that I didn’t shoot it a bit looser – it would have been better to have seen more of their bodies, and some of the little French cafe patio they were sitting in.

This is one of my more successful attempts at panning.  It’s also another of those images that I tried to make timeless, but purposely leaving out any elements that are overwhelmingly modern.  I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure what runway lights and signs looked like during WWII, but I don’t imagine they’re all that different.  To the non-expert, there’s nothing here that screams 2010.  No cars in the background, no people, etc.  Just that lovely B-17 trundling down the runway, just about to lift free.

I’ll finish out with a detail shot, which is one of this things my mentor always said to include.  Wide-open aperture, up close to the gun barrels to throw the BG just a bit soft.  It’s the flaws that I’m interested in here, the missing paint and signs of wear that make this look real.  The sepia helps bring this out.  And the end result is a good look at why you sure as hell didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a P-47 attack.