Tag Archives: Fly Day

Heritage Flight Museum May Fly Day

I was planning to head up to Skagit for the May Fly Day at the Heritage Flight Museum anyway.  As it turned out, I had been talking with Rich at COAP about the trip he was leading and, when he asked if I would like to tag along with their group, I said yes.  They had been working with the Museum and arranged some opportunities to shoot from locations that normal ticket access wouldn’t allow.

The team at COAP and the team at the museum were super helpful and friendly.  Add to that, the weather was great and the combination of aircraft they were able to put up was excellent so, the day was set to be a bunch of fun.  It did not disappoint.  I have shot at the museum fly days before but, sometimes, the planes I was after didn’t fly and sometimes the conditions weren’t ideal.  On this occasion, everything came together.  I did play around with my shots trying to get more dynamic images.  The high vantage point we had available helped with that too.

I took a ton of shots and culled them heavily.  The result was a few shots I was particularly happy with and it was nice that the museum shared a few of them on their social media platforms too.  Seeing the Skyraider fly is always cool but the day was a trainer day and they put up some great trainer formations.  The conditions were a little bumpy but they made a good job of it and there were shots to be had.  I look forward to the next time I am up there.

Stealing A Composite Idea

Quite a while back, I saw a shot that someone had composited of a Typhoon display over an airfield where they had the jet throughout its routine to show its route through the sky.  I liked the idea and, while it was totally different, it got me thinking when I was up at Heritage Flight Museum.  They had the Skyraider on the ramp but not flying.  It was ready to go but hadn’t yet been signed off.

However, they did do an engine run for the visitors and unfolded and folded the wings a few times.  Having got some basic shots, the idea of the Typhoon display popped in to my head so I shot a sequence of shots of the wings as they folded and unfolded.  I took way more than actually was a good idea.  I imported them all in to Photoshop as layers and then hid all of them except one and then progressively added some back to get the wings in different positions.  If I had used them all it would have just been a blur of wings.

With the ones I wanted selected, I changed the blend mode for all but the base layer to Darken and that meant the dark wing elements overlaid anything brighter behind them.  The result was a composite with multiple wing positions all showing at once.  I think it came out quite well.  I thought I might have issues with hiding things I didn’t want to or having to much movement between shots but that wasn’t a problem in the end.