Tag Archives: rotate

Air to Air With United Jets – Or Is It?

When putting together some images for a group online that I am involved with, a dug out a couple of shots of jets departing O’Hare I shot years back.  When coming off 22L, some of the jets make an early turn to the south and you can get a view of them that is either quite level with the wing line or slightly above.  When shooting them, they are climbing so it is obvious what you were shooting.  However, as I looked at these shots, it occurred to me that they looked a lot like an air to air position except the angles were wrong because of the climb.  Since I had shot quite tightly, re-cropping the shot required some Photoshop work.

Taking the image out of Lightroom and in to Photoshop, I selected the crop tool and rotated the image to be the sort of angle that an air to air shot might be.  Doing this crops off the nose and tail of the jet.  However, one feature of the crop tool in Photoshop is that, if you then drag the edges of the tool back out, you can expand the canvas size.  You now have the whole plane in shot but have added some white space in each corner where no image previously existed.

It is a simple task to then use Content Aware Fill to add sky back in to these areas.  The result is a shot that looks almost as if you had been flying in formation at altitude.  Would you have spotted it?  Having done it with an A320, I then had a go with a 757.  The light angle makes it look a bit like we are flying along towards a setting sun.  I was rather pleased with the trick.

A330 Wheelies

AU0E9692.jpgI have seen a few Airbus A330s landing recently and they have a slightly unusual landing approach. I am not sure whether this is a feature of the design, the training techniques for the pilots or just a random occurrence that I have seen more than my fair share of. The planes appear to do a wheelie as they land. They have two main gear legs with a four wheel bogie on each. As they touchdown, they seem to hang on the rear wheels longer than would seem normal, even as the aircraft is de-rotating.  Meanwhile, the reversers will start to deploy (sadly not in any shots I have) so there must be enough weight on wheels to trigger their activation. Gradually the jet sinks down on to all main wheels and the nose lowers.