United States - Michigan - Thunder Over Michigan 2008 - Romulus - 08/09/08

[FlyingKiwi]

Arrival day shots sure had the best light.
Wish it had stayed that way for the weekend.

Lovely shot of the MiG, Bill!

Richard.

[DetroitMister]

Here are 3 pictures of the MIG-21 at the Ann Arbor airport... not the best, but still neat, to me.

[Steve K]

Wow, now this looks like AN AIRSHOW!!!!!!!    I'm sensing the need for a road trip next year! Stunning work by all -- some truly awesome shots!

[tbunce]

I like how this came out!   

I have more that might even be better... but have to go to a party now. Darn. 

Friday's arrival. Very Cool!

[tbunce]

Just finished stitching a set from Friday at the Yankee Museum's borrowed hangar during engine runs.

I got really lucky to find a gentleman willing to escort me out to the ramp. Unfortunately I didn't have a way to write down his name to give him proper credit here.

This is the first set with the B-25 in focus, I have the rest of the lineup with two B-17's and a C-47 looking all pretty in a row. Those are a second and third set of photos where they are fully in focus. I usually set my f-stop high enough to get them all in focus at the same time, but made what I hoped was not a huge mistake by leaving my f-stop at 5.6. I noticed it soon enough to finish the set, then took two more sets in order to get the other aircraft in focus. I was worried, I'll tell you. But I was also hopeful that it might actually turn out really well since f5.6 is the sweet spot on my 70-200 f4 L lens for sharpness. It worked. This is probably one of my sharpest photos so far.

Full image is 10 times bigger, 76 Megapixels, or 43x24 inches at 270 ppi. I think this was less than 40 of the 120 pictures I took for the full lineup.

[tbunce]

While this set is wonderfully sharp and detailed, I wouldn't recommend doing it this way unless you really, really want a great shot, and/or someone is paying you to do this.

I spend the better part of yesterday and another 6+ hours today in Photoshop painting in and out the individual layers to select the sharp portions of the three layers. I really needed two more layers to do it right with such a shallow depth of field. There was a part between the foreground B-25 and the midground B-17 that was not as sharp as the rest. But since it is on the concrete, it isn't so noticeable. The near foreground concrete is also blurry, but again, it's not as important.

The detail shot is 1000 x 800 just to get the last two aircraft's nose art in view at 100% resolution.

Very sorry the full image is so big, but at 10% scale it's about the only way to get the vertical size to where you can see what's going on. Full image is 135.2 Megapixels, or 82 x 23 inches at 270 ppi. 1.2 GB file size as 16 bit .psd

This is the kind of thing I've been wanting to do since I started this over a year ago. A nice lineup of old warbirds, beautifully restored and ready to go where you can see the nose art at full resolution for all of them. Love that detail! 

[tbunce]

A quick 6 image stitch of the Canadian FA-18.

There was a very convenient stump outside the fence that provided just the right height to take pictures over the barbed wire. You can see it in the foreground here but it's pretty blurry.

This is 7000 x 3600 or something. For me very small at only 25 Megapixels. But I have a set with more zoom and more of the background B-17's in view. That's like the Yankee Museum Ramp image above, so I'll save that for a rainy day in the winter.

I also have this shot in the morning with that great light that I think is a better image.

[Coz]

Thomas,

Great pictures!     I don't know how you find the time to do it, but your results are amazing.     I enjoyed meeting you at Applebee's for dinner and was even more impressed when you showed us your full size printouts (20 x 80 ?) of your stiched images.   Just stunning!!       Most large posters look real soft up close.  However, yours are as sharp as a tack!

Chris

[FAR148]

Thunder over Michigan is always my most anticipated show. Tom and Kevin does such a great job putting together a great show. Can't wait to see what's in store for next year!
Was going through my pics from TOM08 and found these beauties.











Steven L

[tbunce]

Finished up Tarheel Hal, P-47 in honor of the Lone Star Flight Museum where this was and will be based in Galveston, TX after they rebuild.

55 Megapixels after cropping above the flaps to make it fit a 24 x 36 inch frame. Looks great!

The detail image is a small version of a picture I took an hour or so after this set of images. I changed the two letter code to make it look like it's squadron mate   and inserted it at the proper field of view for the 200mm zoom that it was, as compared to the 70mm for the other 26 images. I also took the liberty of appropriating some clouds from another set of an A-10 right after this to declutter the background. I've firmly fallen into the 'art' aspect of photography with that kind of liberty, but I say: use the tools you have, invent what you don't for the next time.

[tbunce]

Here is the original full size version of the pair of P-47's doing the WWII re-enactment ground support. I really would like to get a 300mm f4 L IS zoom...

[tbunce]

Here is a stitch from Friday morning on the other side of the airport where they were doing engine runs on the B-24, B-17, and C-47.

I have tons of photos to put together, this was one of the first set before they fired up the engines.

B-24 Ol' 927

This is about 56 x 20 inches, I forget now exactly what it was. I didn't want to make this 1/20 or it would be too small, but 1/10 was too big... It takes too long to open a 1.2 GB file in photoshop to find out for sure 

[tbunce]

Next up is the B-17 Yankee Lady.

This is 1/10 size, so it's a bit large in width, but then again, these are big airplanes!

18900 x 7430 pixels, 140.4 Megapixels.

[tbunce]

I was feeling ambitious over the weekend and got another one done, just going down the line...

C-47 Blue Bonnet Belle and B-17 Thunder Bird.

20,000 x 3920, single row panorama. 56 x 11 inches at 360 ppi.

1/10 size again, so way too wide if you don't have a 23" wide screen monitor, but tough. Scroll! Imagine how much scrolling I have to do with the full version! Poor, poor me...