Earl Unimpressed by Helicopter

Minute Muffler Blimp

I shot this image at an air show in 1990. I probably should have cropped out the off-kilter horizon, but somehow I think it adds to the goofy charm of the Minute Muffler blimp. Does Minute Muffler still exist? If yes, this counts as an advertising success.

Note the lens flare pentagram. I guess that's the iris opening up and being captured in the glass. Or it could be a photonic energy weapon shot from the bow of the blimp. Pew pew! 

Hawk One Canada

The mysterious Hawk One Canada, glimpsed on the ground at an air show in 1984. Was there a Hawk Two Canada? Or a Hawk One Turkey? 

And the Spinoff, Jeff Thunder

Safety Systems Susan

One day in the summer of 1993, Jeff and Susan and I went to the air show in Namao. At one point Susan wound up in this costume; I don't remember why. A added a sepia filter and some background blur to give the photo an old-timey look. I'm not sure what safety systems Susan was checking, or if she's a qualified aircraft mechanic. 

Contrails

This image looks better than it originally did, with the contrails masked by power lines and a gawking crowd willing about below. Still, I haven't gotten the colours quite right; the original vibrancy of the day is missing. This might also work better if I painted out the hangar at left, or if I'd captured more of the control tower at right. Ooo, if I were really ambitious I could clone the tower and flip it to built a complete one...maybe next time.

Air Show Gothic

I've lost count of how many air shows I've attended, and we seem to have photos of all of them. Most of our family air show shots depict little more than small dark pinpricks against oceans of blue sky, because of course I was shooting without the benefit of a telephoto lens. Mom had better results because she focussed on people. I like the ice cream theme.

Sideways Snowbirds

I photographed these Snowbirds at the Namao air show of 1986. Naturally the image should be rotated 90 degrees clockwise to place the AWACS radar dome visible at right at the bottom of the frame, but I think the image looks more dramatic this way.

Parachute Shoot

A Canadian parachutist does a loop-De-loop for crowds at the Namao air show, 1994. It's a little blurry, and yet somehow I feel that it adds to the photo's otherworldly, almost painterly effect. Aside from fixing the dust and scratches and fixing the colour, I altered little.

Bomber Before and After

Click to embiggen!

In 1984, I attended an airshow at Namao. As usual, I snapped photos with my Kodak, which I am now dutifully scanning into my hard drive for posterity. This is a time-consuming process. Not only must I scan every negative, I must also do my best to restore the images.

On the left you can see an image as scanned, complete with the edges of the negative, dust and scratches, faded colour...it's seen better days. On the right is my attempt at restoration, cropped, colour-corrected, with dust and scratches repaired. Thanks to Jeff Shyluk I've learned that it's not enough to simply choose "auto tone" and "auto colour" and hope for the best; to achieve this result I played with the histogram, with curves, with the hue/saturation tool...but mostly I fooled around until it looked right. Sharp-eyed sleuths will not that I attempted to remove a bit of the reflected sunlight from the airplane near the cockpit, and that I had to repair the letters in "FORCE" to do so. This probably steps over the line from restoration to alteration.

I clearly have a lot to learn about Photoshop, but every one of these little projects reveals something new.