cyberflyer · Feb 17, 2003 02:41 PM
#0 sourceI have an Olympus D-370 which I got when AOL had a deal on it. It's a reasonably good middle quality camera with 1.3 megapixel resolution. The first thing I did when I got the camera was buy the largest flash memory card I could find that would fit, which in my case was 128 MB. What this does is give you tremendous freedom to just shoot and not worry about film.
At the lowest resolution 640 X 480, 128 MB will store 887 images.
At the highest quality 1280 X 960, 128 MB will store 204 images.
I keep my camera set at 1024 X 768 resolution which lets me take 532 images before I run out of camera storage.
I now know I am shooting an image that is 1024 pixels wide and I will be scaleing whatever ends up of interest in the image down to 500 pixels wide. It is ALWAYS better to digitally scale down than up.
That means I can take an empty camera and shoot 500 pictures without worrying about running out of space. Which is way more than you need to document a contest. (Unless it's the Nats.)
So, with a very large Smart Media card and medium resolution, you can go to a contest and shoot a lot of images, knowing that you are only going to use a small percentage of them. This gives you the freedom not to worry about running out of 'film' or the cost of an image, which in turn lets you experiment.
The second rule is to compose your images so you get as much airplane in the shot as you can. We need to maximize the visual information presented that is of interest while minimizing the size of the image Len has to store and everyone has to download.
One trick is to angle the wing at about 30-40 degrees, so that parts of the airplane are sticking out in all directions and thus more of the pixels used are showing the plane and not the background. For instance, here is a monokote Ringmaster:
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This side view gives us a look at the engine/tank set up and most of the image is airplane.
If you take the time to angle the camera, you can quickly compose a shot in your mind's eye that will present the maximum amount of airplane and minimum amount of background. Here are a number of other airplanes at the contest:
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This Profile Wildcat had the engine mounted on the inside of the circle.
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Eric Rule had his new .25 sized Profile Mustang on display.
I used to use 400 pixels wide by however many high as a standard width on the old forum. I have now gone up to 500 pixels wide by however many high as Len has increased the size limit. Some folks have suggested 640 is a good standard, but I think that is too big.
What I do is:
A) Compose every shot so I see maximum airplane inside a rectangle inside the image.
B) Crop every shot in Photoshop so that I have an image, usually around 600-800 pixels wide, that JUST CONTAINS THE AIRPLANE and a little bit of border. Using the crop tool throws away a lot of pixels that don't tell us anything about the airplane.
C) Image scale each image down (or up) to 500 pixels wide. This standardizes the presentation and makes the browser window about as wide as it is comfortable to read the text in.
D) Unsharp mask to bring up detail, use--as I did in this case--Contrast and Brightness enhancement to bring the pictures up a little bit from the flat overcast sky lighting that was a result of the slight cloud cover we had.
E) In some cases, use the blur tool to blur the grass in the background. The JPEG encoding algorithm tries to preserve detail and if you have an airplane with a lot of simple color sitting on a ground full of grass and rocks, the JPEG algorithm will spend a lot of bytes in the final picture making sure that each blade of grass is clear.
F) Let each picture tell one story. Here's a couple of cases where additional detail belongs in a separate shot.
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Looks to me like an old Hi Johnson Panther
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This ship had a nice old time stunt cockpit detail in it. I had to reduce the brightness and bring up the contrast to allow the instrument panel to show through the canopy.
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Once in a while you have to go to an image that is primarily vertical to tell your story. In that case I will go narrower than the 500 pixel width, just to keep the image from getting too large in the browsere window. Here was a ship that looked as close as any at the contest to a Skylark. Can't tell if the 'Spacehound' name refers to the airplane or the pilot. 
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On the other hand, sometimes all you need is a narrow horizontal strip. In that case you can set the JPEG encoder when you save to a higher quality, since you have a smaller overall number of pixels to present. The higher quality lets you show more detail. One of the details that was in vogue years ago was the use of lace as a masking device, which left a complex pattern. The nose of the Spacehound showed a typical application of this technique. You will note that I blurred the background to allow the JPEG algorithum to concentrate on preserving the fine filigree on the nose.
More in part two.
Because another rule of thumb is that 6 or 8 images are enough for one post.
The Cyberflyer
P.S. This being quick and dirty digital photojournalism for the web, I didn't bother finding out any more than I already knew about the planes and pilots. The point is that the images are here and I am relying on the participants to find out about this thread and add to it their own words about the planes and pilots pictured. The web allows particiapatory journalism. I'm just the cameraman. If you know anyone who build/flew any of these planes, email them and invite them to join the forum and tell us about their work.
Maybe it's an S-1F.