Boff joins the masses - Duxford from the Tank Bank!

[boff180]

Hi all,

Spent a very scorching Sunday on the tank bank in good company. I think I am still recovering for the sun!

I know I'm late to the posting pictures party but to be honest, either my camera didn't like the conditions or I cocked up (most likely the latter) and my images didn't come out how I hoped. After a little moan and rant on twitter, Mark McGrath kindly had a look at one of them and gave me some pointers on how to rescue them.

Here are the results!

Thanks

Andy


27th May 2012 by evansaviography, on Flickr


Belgian Air Compenent F-16 Demo by evansaviography, on Flickr


Avro Anson Display by evansaviography, on Flickr


Eurofighter Typhoon DA4 - ZH590 by evansaviography, on Flickr


27th May 2012 - Tucano ZF269 Close Up by evansaviography, on Flickr


27th May 2012 - by evansaviography, on Flickr


Eurofighter Typhoon FGR.4 ZK333 by evansaviography, on Flickr


- Flares! by evansaviography, on Flickr


- Flares! by evansaviography, on Flickr

Finally, I loved the finale, so here are... quite a few shots of it!



Spitfire Finale! by evansaviography, on Flickr

Spitfire Finale! by evansaviography, on Flickr

Spitfire Finale! by evansaviography, on Flickr

Spitfire Finale! by evansaviography, on Flickr

Spitfire Finale! by evansaviography, on Flickr

Spitfire Finale! by evansaviography, on Flickr

[smacken]

They been rescued well, cracking set I must say , Anson head on is lovely

[nigelblake]

They look good to me too, especially the first F16 and flares shot!

[tankbuster]

Looks like one of the best sets posted, very interested to here what went wrong and how you rectified the problem. I have never rescued a bad picture and ended up with something as good as a few of those.

[Stu]

Good set nothing wrong with them on my iMac screen Andy must been quite close to me for a few of them, can I ask what lens you use please ?

[boff180]

Thanks guys, all (apart from the DA4 shot) with the Sigma 50-500mm OS.

Tankbuster, they were suffering with very bad noise and what looked like underexposure on the histogram. Turned out they were overexposed and as I'd shot in RAW, the noise could be dealt with.

Andy

[Gaz]

Hi Andy,

Great set of shots, looking at them you couldn't have been far from myself. Good to hear you managed to sort the problems you had out, would never of known if you hadn't said.

Gaz

[Agg]

Liking the first F-16 with flares shot a lot, it's weird how much they add to a display, not to mention pictures of the display

[PChaplin]

The Spit shots look great.

[Blackbird]

Great F-16 shots in particular.

Andy

[boff180]

Thanks for the kind comments.

Andy

[ciaranchef]

Brilliant set, lovely lovely photographs, were they all taken on the 50-500mm? crystal clear shots...

[Geoffers]

Thanks guys, all (apart from the DA4 shot) with the Sigma 50-500mm OS.

Tankbuster, they were suffering with very bad noise and what looked like underexposure on the histogram. Turned out they were overexposed and as I'd shot in RAW, the noise could be dealt with.

Andy

Yes it's amazing what you can recover from a RAW image. I once took a close shot of a colour scheme at the front of a train and was fiddling with the curves to make it even more abstract when suddenly my own reflection appeared in the picture - completely invisible in the original. It was quite a shock!

It would be useful and interesting if you could share what you did to deal with the noise, many of us would post more pictures if we had such tricks to bolster our lack of talent. For example, I have some concert pictures (also shot in RAW) that I was convinced were going to be great...

But well done on the shots. My own favourite is the Meteor - it looks SO good in the sky!

[F-86]

Nice set, looks like you recovered them well.

[boff180]

Yes it's amazing what you can recover from a RAW image. I once took a close shot of a colour scheme at the front of a train and was fiddling with the curves to make it even more abstract when suddenly my own reflection appeared in the picture - completely invisible in the original. It was quite a shock!

It would be useful and interesting if you could share what you did to deal with the noise, many of us would post more pictures if we had such tricks to bolster our lack of talent. For example, I have some concert pictures (also shot in RAW) that I was convinced were going to be great...

But well done on the shots. My own favourite is the Meteor - it looks SO good in the sky!

Thanks again for the comments guys!

99% of the magic was done in Adobe Camera Raw, using the exposure, vibrance and clarity sliders before adding curves to sort out the contrast, some images also needed the blue increasing in the colour balance.

For sharpening, it was a case of using sufficient luminance noise reduction (with all sharpening turned off first) to remove the horrible noise, then adding sharpening using the three main sliders (amount, radius and detail) to get the desired sharpening effect to the image. Finally, turning up the "masking" slider until the level of detail not being sharpened was sufficient to make the noise reduction effective... in these shots that was around a 70% mask

Final job was then to crop/resize (don't use biliniar sharper for resizing, it adds noise to the image just use bog standard biliniar) and add a sharpening sharpening via the "smart sharpen" tool set to "lens blur" in photoshop before saving and these are the results!

Andy