The last flight

I know... It's not really a car shot, but hear me out!

I was privy to a night of BTS for a French film crew in my area, I helped by being an extra in a few scenes and shot some BTS for them. They were doing a documentary about the Halifax and wanted to use a real plane for allot of the scenes. Sadly all Halifax's (there are only 3 in the world as far as I understand) are grounded, as a plane enthusiast child I felt bad that this plane would no longer take flight. That gave me an idea. I photographed the plane in a different manner to how I'd seen current shots - many shots felt distorted, so I knew that no matter what I wanted this to be shot at approx 70mm. I had my 70-200mm f2.8 on me which is a gorgeous piece of glass, but I think my lens has issues, the thing seems to back focus... So I manually focused to be sure. The film crew was using large HMI lights, scrimmed and flagged. The light was perfect, looking like the sun was directly in front of the plane. I used the approximate nodal point of my lens (I figured towards the end of the tripod collar foot), placed my fist in a ball on the railing (I was up 1 floor), then placed the 5D+big gun on my fist, my settings were ISO 2500, 1/400th @ f2.8. I rotated the camera on my fist (makeshift tripod), using live view to position and ensure focus. All together there was 10 shots stitched together, the final image was too large to process, so I downsized to 12,000 px across.

Propellers are a bitch to photoshop.

I cut out the plane painstakingly with the pen tool, then threw a sky pano (I had shot earlier during the year), behind the plane then began to copy each propellor, place them on a new layer, then remove the propellor from the plane on the original image (Rig shots has made me pretty decent at removing solid objects from sheet metal shoots).

After all the cutting, repairing and cloning was done, I used path blur, I'd describe the full way how to make the propellers look like that, but that's an article in itself! Regardless to say they're a bitch to make, ask me if you're really interested and I'll make a write up or make a video.

After the 4hr ordeal of the propellers the rest was pretty straight forward... I dodged and burned the plane, threw in some more clouds in the foreground, added a little lighting & environmental effects and the rest was done! In total the image probably took close to 15 hrs to complete, the time to shoot was really cut down with it being prelit.