My father was a ball turret gunner in a B-17 bomber in WW2. After he got out of the service, he got a private pilot license and flew around in a little Cessna until life caught up with him and he had family responsibilities to deal with. He had some interesting adventures both in the service and afterwards in the small plane. After he retired he decided that he would like to fly small planes again, but found out that his license had been pulled. So he began to take lessons, intending to get the license back. I was looking forward to going up in a plane with him, just the two of us. I had always enjoyed listening to his exploits in the air, and it was something I really wanted to share with him. I saw it as a thing that could connect the younger version of him to me. It's not every day that you get that chance. If you can't imagine what I am talking about, watch "Field of Dreams".
But, it turned out that he had a heart condition that would not allow them to grant his license, so he dropped the idea and I was really disappointed. Eventually, after the death of my mother and a calamity of health issues, my father came to live with me. He stayed the better part of six years, and we spent more time together than we had since I left home to go to college. It was nice, and also trying at times. But I always wanted to fly with my father.
About a year before he died, while he was staying with my sister in another state for a little while, I got a chance to go up in a B-17 that was visiting a local airport. It was expensive, but I felt it was the only thread I could grab relating to my desire to share a common experience with my younger father. And of course, I brought my camera along. I took a lot of photos, but there were hundreds of people swarming around the aircraft and I could never get a clean shot. So I did the next best thing - I took some shots that I thought I could clean up later.
The image at the top of the page is the raw shot I took, trying to get a Life Magazine angle of the dramatic front of the aircraft. But as you can see, there are people wandering around all over the place, spoiling the image. So I started judiciously cropping them out of existence...(diabolical laughter). Here is my first crop:
In one fell swoop I eliminated a serious foreground distraction on the right (that cluster of heads in front of the engine). So I think this is going in the right direction, but I really can't get that guy in the shadow of the engine out of the frame easily. I mean with editing in photoshop, for example. It's not impossible, but it won't work well here. So while this looks very much like what I envisioned for the photo, I decided to do another version that is cleaned up more by cropping.
This square crop takes care of the wayward wanderer in the foreground, but the square format has departed from my mental vision of something that looks like a Life Magazine cover. So, I made one more crop just to focus on the bombardier area and the chin guns.
So, this crop restores the image format I was looking for, and focuses more on the turret and nose of the plane. But I've lost the engine in the process, and that provided a little more context. Ah, well, sometimes you just have to take what you can get.
But, there is another thing I can still do to restore my vision. See, in the 1094s, there would not have been much if any color photography available, especially from the war. So I decided to play with the black and white conversion.
In converting to black and white, I increased the contrast significantly and produced a very dramatic effect on the plexiglass nose of the plane, as well as some interesting shadows of the gun barrels. As a somewhat unexpected side effect, the high contrast has almost removed the offending figure in the foreground, reducing him to a shadowy blob. I think this one could have easily looked like a magazine cover from the 1940s. Finally, I made the same square crop just to see what that would look like.
I like it. I can definitely see this as part of a Life Magazine feature about the 8th Air Force in England, for example. And it's exactly the sort of representation they would have wanted to portray: The B-17 rules the sky. It has power (the engine), sophistication (the bombardier's plexiglass nose position) and deadly punch (the gun turret).
So I am happy with my efforts here, because I was able to reproduce the image in my head. I didn't process this in time for my Dad to see it, but I think he would have liked it.
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