Coming in for a Landing

As the summer season begins to fade I reflect back upon the great times experienced during these past months. One such time was my trip to Las Vegas in June. Yes, it was smoking hot in the middle of the desert with triple-digit temperatures each day, but the early mornings and nights were really awesome. During the midday hours we went from one air-conditioned venue to another to avoid the heat.

The image below was one of the few taken during the glaring light of midday. I actually took this from my hotel room in the MGM Grand where I could see across to the McCarran International Airport, which made for some interesting sights with all of the aviation traffic.

A Delta Airlines flight with it’s landing gear down approaches the runway after coming across the mountains in the background. The foreground structure is the hotel’s parking garage. Notice there are no cars on the top level, likely avoided because no one wants to return to a vehicle with temperatures inside exceeding 120 degrees.

Processing

I chose to go B&W with this image for a couple of reasons. As previously mentioned, this was taken through a hotel window and the tinted glass tends to leave a bit of a tinge on the otherwise blue sky. I attempted to fix that in Photoshop but was never really happy with the results, although I think most would not have noticed. in any case, I converted the image to B&W with one of the many presets I have created in Lightroom 4.

Back in Photoshop the B&W version was layered above the color, where I then masked in the color version of the aircraft itself. To complete the task, a little sharpening was added.

Thanks so much for clicking by.

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