Flying - Emergency Help Needed!

At one day's notice I have been asked to take to the air in a light aircraft and take some aerial photographs of our village. We take off this afternoon (8th March) at 2pm.

I have an *ist D which I intend to set at ISO 400 and Hi Speed mode. It looks like being a sunny day.

I have a 20mm, 28mm, 50mm and 75-300mm zoom. (Each will be x1½ for the ist D).

Any tips, apart from hanging on tight?

Malcolm,

Nice assignment

If you have the storage, shoot in RAW mode - especially if you have access to Photoshop CS. It's great at sorting out chromatic aberrations and sharpening. Plus you'll get a better range of shadows etc. If you don't have a couple of gig of storage, then probably set the *istD to bracket mode - you don't want blown out highlights.

If you set to ISO200, and enable Auto Sensitivity, then the *istD will pump up to ISO400 or even 800 or 1600 depending on the lense and available light. Alternatively, since there's probably going to be a bit of vibration (unless you're gliding ) aim for a stop or two above the "shake" value (ie at least 1/40 on a 20mm lens etc).

I would probably set the program line to MTF as well to get the sharpest result out of the lens.

Have fun
Matt

Thanks for the tips and answering so quickly. I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks again for the help. It was a great experience.

I shot the photos with the 20mm, 50mm and 75-300mm lenses at ISO400 to give a shutter speed of between 1/500and 1/1500 at around f/8.

Quite a lot of work was necessary in Photoshop as the shots were taken through the Perspex window which took away most of the contrast and sometimes caused unwanted reflections.

If you want to see some samples, go to ...
http://www.aaka92.ukgateway.net/Bournemouth/

Malcolm,

Great
Looks like you had a fabulous time!
Thanks for putting the images online too. Looks like some need a bit more work on curves, maybe.

Try adding a channel mixer layer on top:
Red: R:120, G:-10, B:-10
Blue: R:-10, G:-10, B:120
Green: R:-10, G:120, B:-10

It'll enrich the colours a bit more (you can play around with the value, as long as each channel adds up to 100%, of course). If you add a small S-curve underneath you'll get a Velvia look to the result

The other trick is to duplicate the layer, USM at 20%, radius 50, 0 and set the layer blend to luminosity. You can adjust the strength by adjusting the layer opacity. (Then stack the curves and channel mixer on top - you'll get more "punch".)

You can adjust the shadows/vignette (eg on 4873) by adding a gradient layer. Start with the black-to-nothing gradient, change the black to white, and change the layer mode to Lighten. Then adjust opacity, and the gradient angle to tease out the shadow on the right. (Angle of 165, and opacity of 20% worked for me).

Also, you should be able to use the dodge and burn tools, set to a low percentage, to tease out the reflections.

(Hope I'm not teaching you to suck eggs here )
Regards,
Matt

Many thanks for the tips - I'm a beginner!

Malcolm,

That was a very exciting assignment!!! I think you were having a good time. As to the tips on working on the shots, I think Matt has said it all well. The shots were not bad... but you still can play around with curves and levels in PS to give them more punch!! Congratulations.


Shotgun

Malcolm!
I LOVE this shot! I hope you don't mind, but I boldly took the liberty to do some level adjustments and a few other things to make this image sing to more of what it really is! It's great and has soooo much in it that wanted to give it a try... hope you don't mind...




Here's your original RAW:

Joshua,

Very nice result
Any chance you can elaborate on the workflow? I just love learning new ways of looking at things through Photoshop

Matt

Sure Matt,

It may sound complicated but if you know PS you'll understand how quick it is to do.

1.Adjust the Levels to make the bottom left area look good - don't worry about the rest yet.
2. fine tune with Curves making a modified S curve (bring down the highlights and add contrast to the midtones)
3. Raised saturation a little.
4. Duplicated Layer and adjusted the Levels on bottom layer until the top right corner looked good - don't worry about the rest.
5. Make a Layer Mask on the top layer and paint through with Black to blend the qualities of both layers.

Then I ended with a final saturation tweek and Sharpened/Edit>Fade Sharpening: 50%


I do a lot of double layer adjustments - one layer for the highlights and the other layer for shadows - then blend them with a layer mask.

Joshua,

Thanks for that I understand completely!

Yes, double layers are great. I like them especially for painting in sharpening for portraits (top layer very/over sharp, paint with 50% brush onto layer mask around eyes etc). I'd really put it to use for handling shadows and highlight like that - very nice!

Try the channel mixer, rather than saturation. It gives a really great "zing" to an image, especially digital. Of course, you can always blend it with the layer mask too

Once again, great result

Matt

Dude!
I do a very similar thing with portraits too!!!
Right on Bro!
Don't ya just love PS!

Cool

Mind you, I can't claim it was my idea. Learned loads of stuff from www.russellbrown.com
Just bought his latest book - some really great tips buried in there. Definitely worth a look, though on face value there doesn't seem to be much. Just the way he describes the layer blending modes is very helpful.

Yup, I looooove PS for image editing. The more you learn, the more you want to find things out!

Matt

Thanks for all the tips.

I've yet to master the double layer technique, but the new uploaded photos have more overall punch due to all your help.

Now to try the double layer.

Joshua

I got as far as " ... paint through with Black to blend the qualities of both layers"

Can you explain this step in a little more detail, please?

Thanks.