This shot was captured at the British Grand Prix. The display team was the red arrows - quite simply breath taking aerobatics.
The shot was taken with my 5d, a 2x converter, as the planes were quite some distance away over a fence - I saw them lining up for somehting that looked good and kept the shutter depressed for a sequence. 3FPS is slow, but this one came out pretty okay. The focus is marginally off, and I had to crop the image to get the composition (I had a monopod attached for the racing, restricting my ability to move to portrait).
Post processing introduced the noise - while the image was good, I pushed the contrast in the smoke and lightened detail in the very heavy shadows of the planes using an HDR version, which I partially overlayed and selectively masked to reveal some extra detail. I added a bit of vignetting to even out the image because the vignetting on the bottom right is in fact the fence that I was on tip toes shooting over.
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Usually aerial shots leave me rather "eh" feeling, but this is terrific. The movement and rich texture of the vapor trails plus that POP of red against the blue sky is wonderful. What great perspective. I gave this high marks and see it did well in the challenge.
my guess is that if you ran this through a noise program it would have scored even higher - i didn't vote in this challenge but wow ! this is one hell of a capture.
This picture awes me. I feel like I am crashing into it. If you told me I was going to give a ribbon to an airplane shot, I wouldn't have believed you. But this is just so beautiful and scary at the same time.
Just by the nature of the distances involved, air show photos are usually so stale, static, and really not much of interest beyond the planes themselves. This is none of those and so much more. The textures, tones and composition are pure wow!
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