Why not raise the Sea Hawk’s u/c, is it stuck in the locked down position for any particular reason?

Are there any hours remaining on that airframe, incidentally – could it be used as spares for the RNHF’s flying one, or even as a replacement?

If you’re not sure about your future with aviation photography, there’s no better way to introduce yourself then with a decent prosumer. Typically a 3rd of the cost of a full DSLR, add a teleconverter and you might get a couple of seasons or more before you feel the need to upgrade to the full kit and caboodle (or save yourself a bundle and decide it’s not for you after all).

Here’s what I achieved with my first prosumer – a Fuji Finepix S5000:

Of course, all the images have been edited in some way, but that’s normal with both prosumers and dslrs.

(The Fujifilm S5600, mentioned by Archer is a prosumer and is generally speaking a digital camera, similar to a dslr, but which doesn’t offer through the lens viewfinding ability – the image you look at when lining up the shot is displayed on an LCD display).

Anyway, here’s a link to pictures on my website which use the S5000 (an earlier version of the S5600).

My Website

sample pictures: –

This one is devoid of Men on Fences – but it was taken the day he was being chauffered around by it’s owner – 6th June 2004, at Old Warden:

Peter’s P51 Jumping Jaques

Ahhh – The Man on the Fence, himself – leaving

It means it cannot find a really good place to take a sample – I’ve found that accepting what it suggests still works quite well, though.

You can move the sample box around, though, if you wish. Mouse over the box, hold down left mouse button and drag.

While it will be well looked after at Cosford…

Well, to date it hasn’t been – from the pictures I’ve seen it’s been left in pieces in wide open sections, open to the elements, completely uncovered for serveral weeks, possibly months. Absolutely disgraceful I call it.

😡 You rarely see a Phantom here, I haven’t seen one for years. Yet in the States full sized ones are flown like blessed models 😡

Great shots – I love the Skyraider one, it has a painted quality to it.

(yes, yes, I know – only kidding)

Oh, that’s easy.

It has 4 section tabs, you only need 3 of them:

Input Image – fairly self explanatory, use this tab to load your original image

Device Noise Profile – This is the section where you do all the work:

There are a couple of methods, I’ll deal with the easiest, the automatic method:

– Click on the “Auto Profile” button (you could load a custom device noise profile, based on your camera type – which you can download from the Neat Image website instead). Don’t worry too much about the sliders and whatever in the right hand corner, it’s all automatic. Once you’ve read and understood the comprehensive tutorials, you can take things much further.

– Once it has found a nice place and taken it’s measurements, Click on “Auto Fine Tune”. This probably won’t make much difference, but I do it anyway. The Auto Complete button doesn’t do anything I can fathom in this (the free) version – It is probably for batch processing.

– Go to the “Output Image” tab and Click on “Apply”.

Once the image is displayed, you can click anywhere on it to compare it with your original image.

Click “Save Output Image” – Don’t worry, you can change the location, and it won’t let you save it with the same filename as the original, it automatically appends “_filtered.jpg” to the filename.

That’s it. In all the tabbed sections, you can zoom in and out (easiest if you have a wheel mouse, and simply rotate the wheel forward and backward) – this doesn’t affect the file, merely the size of the image on the screen.

Try it again.

I generally follow the same steps as “Wannabe Pilot”, namely:

Remove noise using Neat Image or similar

Load new image into Image manipulation s/ware (I use PaintShop Pro 7)

Select the area of the image I want to work with (Crop) – I usually use the select tool, then copy and paste as a new image

Sharpen the image, using the “Unsharp Mask” – read up on how to use this properly – you can overdo it. I use Radius 1.50, Strength 60 and Clipping 1. If it still isn’t sharp enough, I use the same settings again and again (but no more than 3 times in total), rather than adjusting the settings and doing it once.

Then, if necessary, I use the Automatic Contrast and Automatic Saturation tools to improve the final look – Contrast, as I said earlier, can often find hidden detail – especially if the original image is quite dark. Saturation can easily be overdone – I use it as sparingly as I can to make colours a little more vivid – but try not to oversaturate.

Well much of it seems to have been recorded at Old Warden! They kept that a bit of a secret?