Following on from my last entry, this is my second post about this year’s RIAT. It follows the theme of discussing individual pictures, in this case, Black Eagles Spiral (Fig. 1). A shorter version of this has already been published on the Royal Photographic Society's website for their Digital Imaging Group.

Airshows are one of the summer's most popular outdoor events. Pre-Covid about 4 million people attended them each year in the UK. But, the popularity of airshows means that it is a challenge to make pictures that are distinctive. About 170,000 people attended the recent Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) airshow: how do you get a picture that is your own, and not identical to thousands of others? (See Fig. 2)

One of the highlights of this year's RIAT was the Republic of Korea (South Korea) aerobatic display team, the Black Eagles. I wanted to make an image that was a little bit different and that reflects their amazing skill. This piece is about one possible approach to this.

Towards the end of their display, the team makes a high loop of all 8 aircraft. Coming over the top of the loop, they break formation and spread out as they head towards the Earth in a spiral.

Something I've done in the past with success has been to take a quick series of images and composite/blend them together to reveal the paths taken by the aircraft.

My fundamental approach is generally (a) shoot as many (or more) frames as are needed (b) bring them into Lightroom for basic development and synchronising to ensure a constant appearance between frames (c) select the frames I'll need (d) load the selected frames as layers in Photoshop (e) make the composite (f) save the resulting composite as a layered .psd/.psb "master" file (g) view the "master" file back in Lightroom and export JPG files for posting on the web etc.

In this case, I used a wide-angle lens, and, as the planes came over the top of their loop, shot a series of images to composite together. I estimated that a 35mm focal length on a full-frame camera would give a wide enough field of view, and that proved to be the case. Not knowing in advance how many pictures I would need, or how much space I'd need between the aircraft, I opted for overkill. My camera does 30 frames per second, and a 2-second burst — covering the time from when the planes began their dive to when they disappeared out of the frame — gave me 60 frames to choose from. That was always going to be more than needed, but the point was to give me options that I could subsequently choose from. I did not have my tripod with me: these were shot hand-held, keeping the camera as still as possible.

After the event, I loaded the 60 frames into Lightroom Classic. The first thing was to choose one frame to edit for contrast and to bring out the sky. Once edited, I made an initial crop to tighten the composition. At that point, I selected the remaining 59 images and synchronised their development, including the crop (Mac shift-cmd-S, Windows: shift-ctrl-S and Check All) (Fig. 3). Thinking ahead to how I would composite them, the develop settings I selected turned each aircraft into a silhouette: more on this below.

At that point, a choice has to be made as to how many images are going to be sent to the composite. 60 is far too many: I guessed around 15 would be a good starting point. Selecting one in four images gave me that many, and I sent them into a single Photoshop document in layers (right click -> Edit in ->Photoshop Layers) (Fig. 4).

The first thing to do was to align all the images. Since they were all shot within two seconds, the clouds would not move much, and they were the dominant feature of each image. To align them, select all layers, then Edit -> Auto Align Layers -> Auto (Fig. 5).

How to composite them? Keeping it simple, I opted to make use of the fact that the darkest parts of each image were the silhouettes of the planes. Going for silhouettes means that the details of the planes — especially the "golden eagle" scheme on each — would be lost; for me, that does not matter given how small each one is in the final frame.

Because the planes are the darkest part of each image, the simplest way of compositing them is to use the Darken Blend Mode on the layers in Photoshop, except for the bottom layer which is kept as Normal. Adobe explains the Darken blend mode as follows:

Darken. Looks at the color information in each channel and selects the base or blend color—whichever is darker—as the result color. Pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change.

To do this, I selected the top 16 images and changed the blend mode to Darken (Fig. 6) — the aircraft all immediately appear on the screen in their tracks.

Note that the smoke trails are all lost (compare Fig. 3 with Fig.1). Where the smoke trails cross the blue sky, the smoke is lighter than the sky, meaning that Darken eliminates them. For me, this helps as it simplifies the image: 15 different smoke trails from each aircraft would be a bit much.

Looking at the initial composite, I wanted to make one change. Towards the outer edges of the image, the spacing of the planes was not exactly to my taste: correspondingly, I dropped out one frame, and substituted others to give more harmonious spacing. A slight crop further gave the final composition. (This is why I like to over-shoot, and have more frames to choose from.)

The final layered "master" file is big enough that it had to be saved as a .psb file — Adobe's large file format. One possibility would be to flatten it to save space and store it as, say, a lossless compressed .tif to save space. But, my preference is to be able to go back and re-edit the original if ever I need/want to make a change.

Because I had loaded the original images from Lightroom into Photoshop, the resulting .psb file reappeared in Lightroom. These days, I generally export .jpg files from Lightroom for convenience (although there is nothing wrong with exporting from Photoshop). The "master" file is untouched by Lightroom, and with my standard export presets I can make the .jpg files of the size and quality I want with one click or keyboard shortcut. (I also tend to print from Lightroom, too, these days.)

As a general point, because I used an overkill approach to taking the pictures, I only used a quarter of those I took. What this means is that if your camera does, say, 5-7 frames per second, that is plenty to try this kind of thing. If it doesn't, there is nothing to be lost by trying it anyhow.

All in all, this is a picture I enjoyed making tremendously. It expresses my reaction to the Black Eagles exactly as I had intended beforehand; the sky is better than I dared hope. And I have seen no sign that any one of the 170,000 other people who visited RIAT 2022 made the same picture.