Retouching to make your jets look real

Recently I have been fooling around with my digital camera and Photoshop, trying to make the cold war jets I have been building look real. I am based in Thailand at the moment and had the unique opportunity to fool all my workmates that these babies were screaming over Bangkok during the Coup - hehe

Is anyone else out there into creating realistic photos of their models? I’m shooting mine hanging from fishing wire off the edge of my skyscraper apartment and adding in after burner, con trails and such - great fun! If so please come to my blog http://finescale.blogspot.com/ and post your photos or at least come and take a look at what i’ve been doing.

At the very least I sure could use a little feedback on my work - not too many modellers out here it seems :slight_smile:

I think the first pic on your blog with the MiG 21 is the most realistic Patrick, BUT they all pretty good. Nice work. Keep going.

[#ditto] The first pic looks real. The other ones are good but don’t look as real cause the plane seams to be too close. No airplane could go that close to the buildings. Also, they look out focus. A plane that would goes by that close would look blurr but not because of the focus but because of the movement which is really hard to reproduce.

tonant,

The photography is awesome! My wife saw the screen and wanted to where the jets were flying so low! Thanks for sharing your great work with us!

Brian [C):-)]

I especially like the MiG 21 shots, nice work! [8D] [tup] [tup]

MIG 21 shots are my latest efforts, as such they benefit from more experience. Now I’m starting to build a 1/48 MIG 19 Academy kit and am going to try and simulate a rocket launch. I’ll be searching the web for air to air launch pics to grab the smoke trails - I expect this one could be quite tricky to pul off but will take the realism to the next level.

Your absolutely right - way to close. After the first batch I rigged up a pole with fishing wire to get the model further away from my camera and in some cases shot the background without the model to montage it on in reduced size to get more distance.

With my next set of shots I’m thinking to simulate them being taken from another jet and include plexiglass effects on the shot - give the feeling that the photographer is a pilot in another jet taking happy snaps of his buddy :slight_smile: In this case the closeup should not be an issue.

Great idea, can’t wait to see those. BTW, the afterburner effect you did is awesome. Nice shots.

Whoo-hoo! Another modeler in paradise. I’m down on Samui and have to get my supplies on roadtrips to coup-city or by mail order

Oh yeah, nice pics!

Central World have the best kit i’ve here so far - do you have anywhere else you can recommend (that’s cheaper)?

I have just posted my first two rocket launch simulations - let me know what you think. Now I’m considering trying to created a pic of a cannon/machine gun burst :slight_smile:

Actually now my big concern is creating models with the landing gear closed up. It seems all the modern kits are designed really only to work with them down. What would be really great is to build the kit initially with the landing gear stowed and then after photography rebuild it with the landing gear down. I might try this with the MIG 19 build that i’m doing now. Need some kind of glue that will all me to take it apart easily later - we’ll see.