Abandoned airfield

horrocks

horrocks

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Toby
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Old wartime airfields make interesting and potentially highly atmospheric subjects. The landscape tends to be open, the skyscapes huge, and there is often a quite ghostly air of neglect and of significant things having passed by. The potential always seems to be frustrated though in my inept hands. I took this shot a few weeks ago in the evening. The sun wouldn't poke out from behind the clouds, leaving the sky bright but the ground somewhat flat. I just can't seem to get this to come to life.

1. From the camera..
DSC_5901.jpg


2. I couldn't make it work in colour, so I desaturated then used contrast masking. To get life in the foreground, everything ran too pale and rather flat, though there is a pleasing ethereal quality...
DSC_5906BW3.jpg


3. I little more work improved contrast, but it still seems light. Any further increase in contrast just made the halo around the trees stand out more..
DSC_5906BW4.jpg


4. I had another go from scratch, using more sharpening, but although the contrast seems better, the trees have lost all detail and the slightly ethereal atmosphere of #2 and#3 has gone..
DSC_5901EBWB.jpg


Any thoughts or comments would be really welcome..
 


Hope you didn't mind me trying this.
 
I have a program called Dynamic Photo HDR. It will produce HDR pictures from multiple RAW or JPEG files or produce a psuedo HDR from a single JPEG.
 
It's a shame when the sun won't come out when you need it. If like here your sky is too much brighter than the ground you can use an ND Grad filter, which is half dark and half clear. Lined up along the horizon, that would darken your sky and allow you to have a lighter foreground without overexposure. Alternatively you could take multiple exposures and merge them.
 
Quote "Hope you didn't mind me trying this."

Strangeways, I don't mind at all. That software you use is very clever. You have brought out the flat areas brilliantly, and held the skies with no haloing behind the trees at all. I guess the downside is that it is just too "HDR" for my tastes, and I think it loses the all-elusive 'atmosphere'. Are you able to 'pull it back' a little, that it might look a bit more natural?

The Matt, I am going to invest in some ND Filters. I notice that there is a kind of ongoing debate between ND filters and post-processing techniques such as HDR on this forum and elsewhere.
 


Is this any better? The program will let you do as much or as little as you want. It comes out different on my laptop than it does on my desktop. I think it is the screen.
 
Sorry I forgot to remove the dust speck in the cloud.
 
I downloaded the trial to have a crack at it myself. Interesting. It certainly takes some of the slog out of PP. It brightened up the B&W version too, holding much more detail in the trees, though still (I think) at the expense of some atmosphere. It would be interesting to apply a subtle silver or platinum tint to it perhaps to try to hold the 'feel'.

DSC_5901Dynamic2BWB.jpg
 
Last edited:
I like those pics.
You can almost hear the aircraft engines starting.
 
arclight said:
I like those pics.
You can almost hear the aircraft engines starting.
Click to expand...

You can indeed, very precisely. The airfield is the old base of the 387th Bombardment Group, which flew twin engined B26 Marauders as part of the 9th USAAF in 1943/44. I happened to walk up there this morning, and it was so quiet and so uncannily still that all I could hear was the creak of my boots as I walked the old peri-track. When I stood still I swear I could hear the bang from the starter cartridges and that distinct, eneven, hollow rattle as the engines fired. There is actually very little left there bar the ghosts, and the odd stretch of tarmac. The place has a real atmosphere.

It is said that a young American engineer who was bart of the battalion that built the airfield was so desperately homesick that he went into one of those woods in the pictures, sat down under a tree, and died. He was 19.

Have you noticed that the birds stop singing in August?
 
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