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Opinion on QC for these pics requested please?


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Hi all,
 
Since my introduction a couple of weeks ago I've been uploading my archives on a near daily basis and so far, so good - no QC issues...yet! I've now got a sequence of images that I would like to take a couple of examples from and add, but they contain something that may or may not, depending on how the QC works here, be a issue. I'd like to put the pics up here and get an opinion please. I think that is okay as I can't see anything in the rules to the contrary but if not. my apologises and I will remove/edit.
 
I come from an aviation photography background, and regularly upload to aviation databases that 'screen' images for quality, but I realise that they're approach is not necessarily the same as a stock photography website. These two below contain, for obvious reasons, a lot of blown grass in front of the subjects. Now that wouldn't be a problem at a aviation database site, as the 'screeners' would be familiar with the situation and a pass/fail would not be applied because of the grass. Any ideas how that would work here at Alamy? Would they understand that a couple of AH's shot at point blank range will have a lot of blown grass in shot, which adds to the 'story' in the picture, or would they just fail it on QC grounds? If I failed screening at a aviation site it's no big deal, but here I read that you will have your upload privileges pulled for a while?
 
The pics (obviously copyright would not be on the uploaded versions)

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Gary

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Can't be certain without seeing 100% crop, but I agree with John, if the helicopter cockpit is sharp when viewed at 100% and there are no "dust bunnies" in the sky or chromatic aberration, you should be OK for QC. They should understand the blurred grass (blown about + heat plume from engines)  and the blurred rotors.

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Thanks guys. I will go for it. Those shots had been uploaded and passed screening at the most picky of the aviation database sites so I didn't think there would be any issues on the usual stuff like contrast/sharpness...etc. Just didn't know the criteria about the grass spots in the foreground.

 

As for the rotors and shutter speed...that's many years of experience of taking helo's. I will normally default to 1/320 on shutter for helicopters and prop aircraft, that's slow enough to get some rotor blur, as in the AH shots above, but fast enough to usually get some sharp images in a sequence, even then an average I would say is one keeper in every five/six. Obviously, you can go slower, but experience tells me that your success rate plummets even further. Most of my set ups, as in the arming demo with the Apaches above, are one pass opportunities, I get one sequence of shots, and that's it, so I go on the conservative side. I agree that stopped blades and props look ridiculous, and I've seen many examples taken by photographers not familiar with aviation try it and shoot at around 1/1000 or more - they get a sharp airframe, but a frozen propeller/rotor. It takes a very slow shutter speed to put some real motion in the blades. It also depends on the rotor speed on the actual type you are shooting, and Apaches have a particularly slow rotor speed - try a Chinook, they're even slower!  I had time and position with this Lynx below, so played around with it and got the speed down to 1/60, even then I got just one sharp image out of around twenty. Other guys I know in the same field generally get the same results.

 

3734738805_ec9d0ea9a7_o.jpg

 

Gary

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It's increasingly obvious to me that motion blur is something we all perceive very differently - those pictures are just right for me in terms of conveying the helicopter is active and not suspended by invisible wires.

 

It's the same with waterfalls - the "Indian Restaurant" fuzz does nothing for me - I like to see the droplets / water sheets obviously in motion but defined!

 

John Crellin

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