A North American T-28C Trojan
This is the base image that the entire light-painting was based on. The western sky was pretty darn bright at this point in the early evening! Once it did get dark out, Joannie and I went to work creating the photography for the final artwork.
Our next cool light-painting project, of a North American T-28C Trojan, was created at H.L. Sonny Callahan Airport (KCQF) in Fairhope, Alabama. Specifically, this is T-28C Trojan NX649DF and is proudly owned by a super-nice guy named Rich.
Joannie and I met Rich at this year’s EAA Airventure at Oshkosh. He really loved what he saw in our Light Painting Photography Booth and commissioned us to light-paint his beautiful aircraft for him.
Here’s a selfie of Rich, Joannie, and me at sunset with the T-28C Trojan behind us.
It turns out that he had stopped by a couple of years earlier, because he told me afterwards that he’d found one of our brochures from a previous year. We’re very pleased to know that we made a strong impression back then!
Light-Painting at H.L. Sonny Callahan Airport
Joannie and I were still on our light-painting trip in Arizona and Utah in early October when Hurricane Isaias was barreling down on eastern Florida and southern Alabama. Because of that, we were more than a little concerned for everyone in that part of the country, and we wondered if we’d even be able to do the project.
While Hurricane Isaias did indeed cause major damage to many areas of the south, the Fairhope, Alabama area was spared the worst of it. Rich told us that we could proceed with the plans to light-paint the T-28C Trojan. We flew into the area on October 20th.
When we arrived that morning, there was Rich, detailing his beautiful aircraft!
After a long travel day, we met up with Rich at H.L. Sonny Callahan Airport the following afternoon. I wanted to take a closer look at his amazing aircraft and help to decide where we would create the light-painting that night.
We selected a spot on the tarmac that was out of the way of other aircraft. It also would have the western sky, and very little else (which is a good thing), in the background. Joannie and I would return a couple of hours before sunset to help decide on the exact location of T-28C Trojan NX649DF when the airport crew tugged her into place for us.
Here’s the camera setup for “Version 1” of the T-28C. The sunset continued to get better and better after this image was taken!
A Tiny Bit of History
Rich was kind enough to send us information about some of the history of his T-28C, and we’ll share a little smidgen of it here and much more in the next blog post about version 2.
North American T-28C Trojan BuNo 140649 trained Navy pilots for 17 years, including carrier qualification with VT-5 aboard USS Lexington. (BuNo is an abbreviation for bureau number, which is a serial number assigned to aircraft by the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics.)
140649 was one of 299 T-28Cs built for the Navy with shortened propeller blades and a tailhook, so students could practice carrier landings. Its Wright R-1820 engine gave 1,425 hp, nearly twice the Air Force T-28A’s power. (That remarkable engine is the subject of our 3rd light-painting of this amazing aircraft that we created that night.)
It served the Navy from May 9th, 1957, to May 1974, logging 6,812 flight hours in five tours. It was restored at Williston, Florida, returned to flight in 1995, and today flies as N649DF from Augusta, Georgia.
Light Painting a North American T-28C Trojan
After we had Rich’s beautiful aircraft in place, we had a tough decision to make. What part of the aircraft should we light-paint? The T-28 Trojan NX649DF doesn’t have a “bad side”! On the contrary, she’s stunning from every angle!
After taking a few images from different angles with my iPhone, we talked to Rich about what angle he might like. We also offered to create more than one version, from different viewpoints, if he was ok with that. And that is indeed what we ended up doing for him!
Here’s “Version 1” of Rich’s stunning North American T-28C Trojan.
This is the first of three light paintings that we created that night. I like this version because it shows some of the interior of the cockpit really nicely. Versions 2 and 3 will be coming down the road. Of course, we will have them here once they’re completed!
The Movie
Joannie and I took more than 200 images for this version. Quite a few of those were of the changing sky at and after sunset. In post-production, I used 55 of those images, in 82 individual layers, to complete this beautiful light-painted art of the North American T-28C Trojan NX649DF.
As we do for most of our light-painting projects, we’ve created a short “Build Video” that shows the actual images that we ended up using, and then the creation of the final artwork, appearing one layer at a time. It’s found on our YouTube channel, the link is below:
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read about our cool light-painting project! – M&J