Introduction

I ve presented a few Phantom images on MM in the past, but I ve got a good few more nice pics in my archive, though not all of them can be published here, as some sail a bit close to the wind in using elements from copyright images as starting points. To give one example, I did a picture recently of an F-4EJ, taking the aircraft straight from a box-top, spending maybe 15 hours cleaning it up and correcting errors in the artist s portrayal (all of them quite small), then pasting it onto a totally different background, also from a copyright source. The result is exceptionally fine, and I ve copied it P to P to various of my contacts the registered Phantom Nutters! But, because the aircraft is fundamentally the same as on the box-top, with no change to its décor, it is immediately identifiable, and so the Kopyrightpolizei would be on my tail in next to no time if I were to publish it.

Time was when I couldn t hack the Phantom it s a tricky subject, with lots of selection problems for the novice; but once I had learned how to tackle its complexities I was hooked, and it is now one of my favourite subjects.

 The Initial Image

This is a Luftwaffe Phantom by David Aungst, and it derives from the Hasegawa 1:48 kit. Most Luftwaffe F-4F s were finished in a dull light grey camo overall, but for a while some units adopted a more attractive scheme, using several pale stone and green colours on the upper surfaces. It s a subdued scheme, but rather nice this example of the classic Air Defence Diesel, which served with JBG35, is sporting the multicolour camo scheme.

The photograph is good, with plenty depth of field (no doubt a sturdy tripod was used to allow a small aperture and long exposure time). From this viewpoint the camo doesn t express itself well, but it s the pic I liked best, and so here goes.

Treatment of the Image

Closing the canopies on the Phantom is a demanding job that must be done carefully; it probably took me an hour to select its three components, the whole canopy and its subsets, the framing and glazing. There is a mismatch in the appearance of the final set of glazed areas, because the three windscreen panels are all a bit milky, while the bits that were open are much brighter. I left the front windscreen alone bar some tidying up of the blurry bits, but I applied the increase contrast to the curved port-side panel to bring it up to be consistent with the canopies further aft.

Two other points are worth mentioning. The nosewheel doors are obscuring the inner right pylon and its load cluster. I tried to figure out what, if anything, would show once the doors were closed, and came to the conclusion that it would all be concealed behind the nose fairing. Secondly, and I ve had this problem before with Phantoms, the outer wing seems to have some wash-out relative to the inner wing, exaggerated by this very foreshortened viewpoint. I couldn t get the trailing edges to match, so I compromised and chose a slightly higher line for the outer panel s trailing edge. Why so many models display this feature puzzles me maybe the real thing has a run on the last few feet of the inner wing so that the outer has more incidence.

All the parts of the model that are exposed downwards are in much deeper shade than you would get with an aircraft in flight, so I lightened up most of these soffit edges by various means in general, I used a medium blue for this work, avoiding the bright pinks and yellows that I sometimes use; these slightly surreal colours work surprisingly well in many cases, but they didn t seem appropriate here.

David was meticulous about applying the 200-odd tiny decals all over the airframe, but I only clarified a fraction of them, concentrating on the forward part of the airframe; the rest were left more or less fuzzy.

The national insignia and the aircraft codes, located towards the rear of the nacelle, were a real challenge. They are so small, and are very severely distorted; even on a high-quality photo the shapes of the cross and numerals have broken up entirely. I copied the area where they lie to a fresh file, increased the new portion to four times its size, and laboriously reconstructed what I thought they should look like; then I reduced it back down to quarter size, and pasted it onto my master image.

When it comes to the smaller internal details, you can go on forever cleaning things up, but eventually I called a halt, and pasted the airframe onto a suitable backing.

I wanted this to be a two-aircraft composition, and David s review had another photo of his model that could act as the secondary airframe. I did the selection work on this image carefully, because I wanted it to be good enough to be used as a primary in a later work. But for the purposes of this image, I did a very limited amount of work on the details. I had to laterally reverse the image, so that I had starboard-side details on a port-side view of the model, so anything that was too blatant had to be amended. Likewise I needed to add the orange tank to the port inner pylon, since the disposition of pylon loads is not symmetrical.

Finally, I pasted the secondary onto my master image, and noted that it illustrates better the camo pattern of these machines.

Conclusions

The final picture shows a pair of Phantoms climbing away from a typical northern European landscape, with scraps of low-level cloud partly concealing the ground below. You can deduce from the size of the ground features that we are at quite low altitude, maybe 1000 feet or so in fact, the shot was taken on final approach to Stansted airport.

I am reminded of the image I presented a year or so ago, showing a pair of Starfighters flying low over a similarly murky landscape. I like the atmosphere of these pictures but anyone who is not familiar with the climate in our part of the world should not think it is typical. No, sometimes it s raining as well.