Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: William Walker on August 15, 2016, 10:27:52 am
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I really enjoyed watching this guy work and I thought that this picture had something to it...I wonder what you think.
Thanks!
William
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Had a good friend who used to do that. Lost track of him after Vietnam. Hope he's still alive. He was the kind of guy who'd fly anything, anytime, anywhere.
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An excellent image. A good balance of subject and context.
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As such, it is a very nice, almost pastoral image.
It lends itself, however, to a number of further interpretations. A black and white conversion would add drama. There seem to be numerous cropping (pardon the pun) possibilities too. Vertical, for instance, for a magazine cover, with a lot of copy space. Or a tight horizontal crop, concentrating on the zig-zag leading lines, the plane, and the turbulence behind it.
In short, a great job!
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I forgot to mention that I really like the picture, William. I agree with Slobodan about everything except the cropping.
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And I agree completely with Russ.
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Do you know anyone who looks like Cary Grant? If so, why not composite him into the picture?
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I like it very much. The suggestions are good too I think. If it were mine I'd crop in from the lower right a bit to put the subject on the 1/3. I bet mono would work well too.
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First class as it is!
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Had a good friend who used to do that. Lost track of him after Vietnam. Hope he's still alive. He was the kind of guy who'd fly anything, anytime, anywhere.
Russ, your comment about your friend reminds me of a story I heard about one of my flying instructors (Cessna 150, 23 hours - 5 solo - that's all!).
His name is Rob Taylor and his year alternates between fire season and crop-spraying season. One year he was spraying in the remote northern part of South Africa - staying in an hotel in town and flying out to the farm to spray each day.
After work one afternoon he was flying back to town and spotted a hitch-hiker, late in the day, on a very quiet stretch of road. He felt sorry for the guy so he turned around, landed on the road in front of the hiker and offered him a lift to town!
You can imagine the look on the hiker's face, a guy from somewhere in Europe who was clearly not accustomed to this kind of thing!
Anyway, to cut a long story short, Rob explained the slim chance of a vehicle picking him up before nightfall and told him to climb into the empty hopper. He did, and Rob flew him in to town.
I do know that the Civil Aviation Authority got to hear about it and Rob nearly lost his license.
Rob confirmed the story to me when I last saw him about three years ago.
Thanks to everyone else for the feedback!
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Wonderful image, I like a lot the effect of the spraying / turbulence behind the plane
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What a great story to accompany the great photo!
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Hi William,
I've landed the L20 (the Canadian Beaver) on a few roads, but they were roads inside fences, leading to radar sites. I'd do that sometimes when the site's dirt runway was too muddy or otherwise screwed up to make landing on it safe.
When I was at Malmstrom AFB outside Great Falls, Montana in the mid fifties I had a friend who was a fantastic pilot. He had somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 hours. Sometimes I flew with him, and I learned a lot about flying from him. Let's call him "Coop" (since Cooper was his name). Coop and I were in the 29th Air Division of Air Defense Command, but Malmstrom was a Strategic Air Command base.
One day Coop was taxiing out in an L20 to go somewhere. I don't remember for sure what airplanes SAC was flying out of Malmstrom at the time. I think it was B47's. In any case they had a runway that was more than two miles long. The L20 could get airborne in about two hundred feet, so since he was near the upwind end of the runway Coop asked the tower for permission to take off from where the second taxiway joined the runway. That would give him about five times as much runway as he needed. The tower denied his request, so Coop started taxiing toward the downwind end, two miles away. He taxied faster and faster, became airborne, flew past the tower windows, and landed on the taxiway near the end of the runway.
I don't remember whether or not he got permission to take off after that stunt, but, of course, there was a huge flap over the whole thing. Fortunately for Coop, the SAC base commander was a colonel. But the Air Division commander was a general, and among his other duties, Coop was the general's pilot. The general slapped Coop's hand, but not very hard, and eventually the whole thing was forgotten.
I still crack up when I remember that fiasco.