first published cover... kinda

okay, okay. before i start getting calls from forbes, the cover is pure fun. no, it wasn’t really published. no, i don’t work for forbes. but yes, those are real airplane keys. and yes, that is my buddy, gino siller holding the keys about ready to pilot. not only is he a good pilot, but he’s got some great photoshop talent as demonstrated above!

on tuesday’s Veterans Day, we paid tribute to America’s military veterans by joining the friendly skies. the day before, i called up gino. 60 seconds later, we had a guy’s day out planned. spousal approval wasn’t easy... but forgiveness was better than permission on this one (thanks, hon :)

we headed for the airstrip around lunchtime. after gino completed the pre-flight checks, i grabbed my nikon d-300 with my favorite nikon 12-24mm f/4 anti-portrait lens, an sb-600 and triggered this shot using my radiopoppers. metering the sky was easy. f/11, 1/320 sec, iso 100. the pop-up camera flash was dialed down minus 2.5 in the i-ttl mode and the off-camera sb-600 was set to i-ttl “0.” this allowed the my sb-600 to blend in with the sun to serve as my main light (sunglasses prevented blindness.... not something to you want to bestow on your pilot prior to take-off).

i chose the 1/320 second which made it easier to bring down the ambient light and over-power the sun just a tad. new concept? check out the wrap-up from the coffee-shop class 8 about metering with a flash, kern-photo style.

the nikon d-300 pop-up flash served as on-axis fill made famous by dan winters and explained by the strobist’s on-axis fill article. on-axis fill might be against instinct for some pros. but it has an un-canny ability to increase shadow detail, creating a spiffy 3D pop i like.

funny enough, i nailed the exposure on the first shot, thanks to nikon’s awesome flash metering! i took a few more, but chimping on the back of the screen made me underestimate and over-expose a few shots. next time, i should trust my equipment better.

i like simple lighting. with no time to set up big strobes, i chose to decrease the distance to my subject and use small flashes instead. by taking a few steps closer, my small flash downed a can of spinach and became that much stronger (call it the “popeye effect”).


post-processing magic assisted by the totally rad actions.  here's the recipe:  to desatuarate, i ran "bullet tooth" with decreasing the opacity of "gain" and "tone tweak" masks in the advance settings down to about 20-30%, then selectively added back a bit of blue using "big blue" and yellow "green with envy" (selectively painting them where i wanted).  next up, lightly used "pro retouch" on the skin before painting with "can-o-woop-ass" to bring out shirt shadow details and compress highlights a bit.  final touches included: sensor spot removal, resizing, and running kevin kubota's magic sharpen. (total processing time: 5 minutes). btw: there is some funky over-sharpening going on on the right image, but it is getting late and my pillow is calling my head.

and now for the rest of the story...

checking the radio frequencies (we’re not lost, we promise):


landing a centennial airport for lunch, one of the smoothest landings of my life :)


hanging out the window with my fish-eye lens to capture the view 1500 feet above mile-high denver. the wind was sooo strong. i have no idea how pilots in those open-cockpit planes ever did it.


just kidding, honey :)