New project to share! [View all]

An offshoot of general planespotting, I’ve been concentrating on aircraft at 30-40k ft, specifically early morning or late afternoon when the light and shadow adds so much depth and interest to otherwise boring airplanes. The photos I’m sharing today were made with no generative AI. All my photos are of real planes taken from my backyard shot in RAW (.nef) and processed with Camera Raw and Photoshop.

A majority were taken with the Nikon P1000 @3000mm, a real bear handheld. At 3000mm it’s impossible to find your subject, but thank goodness it has power zoom so you can start from a wide angle and power zoom up to 3000mm while keeping the subject in view. It took me a long time to perfect the method. It’s a comparatively slow camera in focusing and can’t match the quality of more expensive glass, has limited menu options, but it gets the job done. The remainder of the photos were taken with the Nikon Z8 160-600 +TC2 @1200mm and D750, or Df with a 200-500 + TC2 @1000mm.

I’m also still beta testing Topaz Labs and find one of the newest features, “Super focus”, to be quite interesting, rather overpowering with a steep learning curve, but useful for the right photo. Some of these photos used it, some used simple denoise and/or sharpen. Taking photos at dawn and sunset can be quite noisy. Some photos have the plane identified but many are not if I didn’t have my laptop with me. Hope you enjoy some of these!

Examples and link to the slideshow, only 36 as of today
https://jamesdevore.smugmug.com/SLIDESHOW-Cruising-in-a-Special-Light