Planes and photography

[pauland]

Some superb plane photos

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...shire-24672979

[gwpriester]

I like Gray's planes better.

[pauland]

Fair enough.

I like the photographs and I like Grays work, but I'm not sure I'd compare one to the other.

[jon404]

Very good photos! At 26, quite a photographer.

Gray? Quite an illustrator. I particularly like how he uses Xara software to portray little-known aircraft as they probably looked or might have been... and how he seamlessly combines his vector art and bitmap background images.

Love his artwork. A wish for his next one? A 1960's Douglas F4D Skyray... perhaps the last aircraft to follow the designs of Alexander Lippisch, who came our way after cooking up the ME-163 rocket plane in WWII.

[Boy]

I find these are stunning photographs and I can imagine that some of them could serve as inspiration to Gray with regards to composition, color setting, angle, and heat/turbulence effects.

[pauland]

One thing that stands out with many photographs of planes - particularly old warbirds - are the imperfections. I love to see the dings and the panels that are slightly out of line. It shows the life of the machine and we can only imagine the stories it could tell. That first picture of the spitfire is a prime example.

This takes nothing at all away from Gray's superb illustrations.

[Gamerprinter]

Perhaps I'm hijacking this thread (sorry about that), but the topic reminded of some very cool B/W photo images I have access to. This photo is supposed to be somewhere on the coast of Normandy, 3 days before D-Day taken by the bombadier of the 457th bomber group during WW2. A customer of mine brought a box filled with dozens of WW2 B-17 bomber photographs, that he was selling through EBay to a German national. Anyway, my customer wanted hi-resolution scans of the photos prior to him letting them go to his customer. Of course, I still have all the scans of those in my computer. Anyway, I've always thought this photo (if it is Normandy) is very awesome, and significant.

Click the link to see the zoomed in view (higher resolution), look along the beachhead, and see the German pillboxes sitting there waiting for the coming invasion...HERE.

[GabrielRids]

To photograph airplanes in flight is very difficult, I like to catch the moment when a large aircraft such as 747 comes in to land.