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The Mission
Text and Image by André Costantini
Technical and creative Supervisor, Tamron USA, Inc.
The idea for this image came to me one evening while watching a performance piece a friend created, involving modern dance movement and WWII film footage of flying planes. I enjoy shooting performers of all sorts, especially when I can incorporate elements of their work into photographs. In this case, I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the final image to look. All I needed was an old plane and a great sunset. I filed this away in the back of my mind and passively searched for the location.
IN PLANE SIGHT
Three months later, I was driving in northwest New Jersey and
passed this little airstrip. Upon seeing this old plane,
immediately I knew this was the location I was looking for. Several
weeks later, we drove out to the location on a Friday evening
hoping for the shot I had envisioned months before. We equipped our
borrowed van with lighting, film, props, costumes, and even a
camera. As we soon discovered, our loaner van was also equipped
with no gas and a bum gas gauge.
I knew we had encountered our first obstacle when we were coasting
to the side of the Interstate, fuelless and frustrated. Luckily a
good Samaritan-Greg, a Navy SEAL-happened our way and gave us
enough fuel to get to a gas station (and gave the ladies in the
crew a lot to talk about). Our second setback: timing. We had
arrived during the opening weekend of the local county fair.
Sitting in heavy traffic, however, did give us the opportunity to
watch the beautiful sunset we had hoped to use in our photograph.
Unfortunately, we experienced it from the interior of our van! By
the time we reached our destination, it was dark. Having made the
grueling trek, overcoming unforeseen obstacles, we were determined
to get our picture.
WE TOOK A SHOT
I took out my Bronica ETRSi and slapped on the Polaroid back. We
set up two Lumedyne strobes; one to light the plane with the
standard reflector, and one to light our young model, with a white
umbrella. Because the sun would have set behind her, and the plane
and the girl would have been completely in shadow anyway, we lit
the scene the way we would have even if there had been an actual
sunset. We metered the strobes, fired off a couple of Polaroids to
check our lighting ratios and coverage, and then quickly switched
over to film backs.
I had determined ahead of time that I would use the PE 40mm lens,
which is comparable to a 24mm in 35mm format. The wide-angle lens
made the model more prominent in the image and also let more of the
sky and plane into the frame. I wanted the subject really close to
the lens for additional drama. We shot at f/11 for 1/125 second,
which gave enough depth-of- field to keep our subject in focus,
while adding a moody soft focus to the plane.
LANDING THE FINAL IMAGE
We missed the sun the day we shot. Rather than reshoot, I decided
to take advantage of technology to create the final image. So where
did the sky come from? In the following weeks, I kept a Canon A-2E
with a Tamron AF 24-70mm zoom with me. Any sunset I saw became a
contender for adding to the image.
All of the skies were shot at the 24mm setting. Because the 24mm on
a 35mm camera and the 40mm on a 6x4.5 camera provide similar fields
of view, it would not look unusual if the two images were combined.
Joining similar perpectives creates the illusion of a single image.
To recreate depth-of-field, we just had to blur the sky. When I had
found an ideal sunset, I scanned both images and combined them on
my Macintosh G3 using Adobe Photoshop. At last we had our final
image.
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