Designated Survivor

[C J Southern]

My wife was watching The Kardashians on TV ... not my thing, so I grabbed the camera gear - jumped in the car - and thought I'd get a few shots of aircraft landing.

As luck would have it, there were no more scheduled flights that day, but I thought I'd at least experiment a bit. So I set the camera up to align perfectly with the runway centreline (from the public side of the fence) - and zoomed from 70 to 200mm over 30 seconds (it took a few goes to get the timing right).

A short time later I heard the rescue helicopter coming back in - and took quite a few shots as it completed it's flight path.

I've got great respect for the rescue helicopter crews; they're "darn" good at what they do and save an incredible number of lives. I'd even go so far as to say that if you're "behind the 8 ball" and the rescue helicopter team is on their way to help then it's probably your lucky day.

For those who don't know, here in NZ they're all equipped with winches and it's common practice for a medic to be winched down - and medic + patient to be winched up from anywhere from a moving boat at sea to a mountain bike trail in the middle of a forest. Day or night.

So this image is a composite; it took a lot of work to extract the helicopter from the original photo, add in the motion blur, and take some "artistic licence" with some of the helicopter "appendages". But I'm proud of the result.

I thought it looked better in grayscale - and I dedicated it to the rescue chopper crews throughout the country who do what they do so well.

[DanK]

So I set the camera up to align perfectly with the runway centreline (from the public side of the fence) - and zoomed from 70 to 200mm over 30 seconds (it took a few goes to get the timing right).

nicely done.

I don't understand the part quoted above. Was this to extend the view of the runway and create the lines from lights?

[C J Southern]

Thanks.

It was purely an artistic choice - to create a "vanishing point" centered on the far end of the runway.

Here's another shot from the same location but without the "zooming":



I was trying to create a similar feel to what I did here:

[C J Southern]

Was this to extend the view of the runway and create the lines from lights?

Edit: I think this composite is a better example of what the technique adds to the image:

[DanK]

Thanks. Makes perfect sense. I've done a bit of ICM, but it never occurred to me to use it for the background of a composite.

[C J Southern]

For me, that's one of the joys of photography; leaving with the gear - not knowing what I'll come back with - and a day later having a new keeper that I had no idea what it would look like a day ago. Always full of surprises