My Take on the Re-enactment

Here's another photo from Sunday's air show. Every year, they do a battle re-enactment of the attack on Pearl Harbor complete with pyrotechnics and soldiers on the ground. They said the Japanese Zeros were replicas created for the movie "Pearl Harbor." In years past I've always seemed to catch a couple of planes flying through smoke and flames, which makes for a pretty dynamic shot. But this year, when my focusing was at its best, I didn't get that great smoke-filled shot. So I decided to add my own vintage mood to this photo with a couple of layers of clouds and textures. To start with I desaturated my raw file pretty significantly, then added a Nik Color Efex paper toner layer in overlay blending mode to add some contrast and desaturate the image even further. Then I added a couple of film emulsion layers, one in multiply blend mode at 38%, the other in color burn blend mode at 15%. Then the clouds and vintage texture layers came in to further tint and age the image, each masked and applied selectively. Original exposure data was: shutter priority, 1/500 sec, f/9, +0.3 EV, panning with the 300 f/4 lens. After a couple of years of shooting at the air show, I've learned that 1/500 sec shutter speeds will usually give you just a bit of blur in the propeller.