One thing that most of us like is a nice piece of art to put on the walls of our homes. Aircraft enthusiasts will generally gravitate towards aviation subjects. In the past, that has meant either a nice photograph, or if someone wanted something a bit more artistic, a lithograph from one of many fine artists would be the ticket. Of course, lithos are, for the most part, not inexpensive and generally relatively small.

Now we have a third option and that is computer generated artwork. This format falls into several categories as well. One is fully computer generated. These can take a substantial amount of time to develop, and often look just a little bit 'off'.  The other is when actual photos are used and combined with various backgrounds to provide the art.

It is in this latter category that the work of Larry McManus fits.

Larry has been photographing aircraft for decades and has a huge library of aircraft and background images to choose from. This allows him complete creative control over how the image will eventually appear and after many, many hours working the images into the proper perspective and backgrounds, the work is finalized. He then prints these out on photo quality paper using the best laser printers available to produce both small and large format images. His large images are nearly 4 feet in length, making a most impressive image. Other sizes are available and the ones he sent in for review are 11 x 16, which is perfect for me.

This particular image is of a rather rare bird, the SR-71B two seat conversion trainer. This aircraft is shown in flight off the California coastline. It is in its earlier paint scheme of black or very dark blue and silver or aluminum/magnesium. As you can see from the exhaust shock cones, it is accelerating away over the Pacific

It is a superlative piece of work and I highly recommend visiting Larry's web page for more information and to see some of his other work.

My thanks to www.larrymcmanus.com for the review sample.

If you would like your product reviewed fairly and quickly, please contact me or see other details in the Note to Contributors.