First I took the photos, the sky is from my massive collection of clouds which I shoot regularly whenever I see something interesting. This used to cost money when I used film cameras but now thanks to digital it costs nothing so I shoot many more clouds than on film. This particular one is a beautiful shot of low cloud taken outside of my bedroom window. The point about using low cloud is important as you get the correct angle on the upper part of the cloud to make it really look like the shot was taken from a plane flying rather than from the ground.

I took the reference shot of the plane at the RAF Museum Hendon, London, UK. It is important to get the angle right so you need to know what you want to do or take lots of shots, I did not have that much time so I stood in the correct position and put the camera at the appropriate height and took the shots. Why plural, my 7D is a 6MP DSLR, but for the size I was thinking for this poster I needed more pixels, by taking multiple shots in slices and stiching them together to get the final shot I could produce a much higher resolution image. I set the camera to fully manual mode, guesstimated the correct exposure using old techniques from my film days and took a test shot of the brightest part of the plane. Thanks to digital cameras histograms I could do without a light meter, I simply checked I did not burnt out the brighest part of the image, kept the best settings then took 3 shots of the plane in sections, panning left to right, overlapping about 20 per cent, I used a monopod to keep the camera as still as possible, a tripod would have been better and amazingly they are allowed at Hendon but not knowing this I took a monopod which are usually more accepted in museums. My 3 exposures worked very well and I finished with a 15MP version of the plane to work on.

Now the hard work, a lot of PhotoShop erasing and cloning to change the state of the plane from on the ground with its undercarriage down, gear bay doors open and flaps down to a flaps up, gear up and doors shut version. This was more art than photography, fortunately my fine art days played a big part in completing this to the required standard.

So much for the technology, now I moved to the subjective, more artistic part of the process. A good photograph consists mainly of good composition and good lighthing, the subject is mostly irrelevant, so putting the plane in the best position to create the most drama and visial stimulation was key to the success of the image. Balancing the colours was key to making the different parts of the image merge seemlessly into a single photo.

This was the first composite image I did, the process was much the same as for the Me262 except this one took much more photoshop work due to the amount of aircraft obsured by the landing gear and the additional element of the propeller and the addition of the pilot (myself).

Again I took the reference shot of the plane at the RAF Museum Hendon, London, UK, using the same technique as described above.

The hard work in this one was the amount of PhotoShop (Elements 2) erasing and cloning to change the state of the plane, more so than on the Me262 as this plane had very large landing gear and bay doors which obsured much of the underside. Again fixing this was more fine art than photography. To put the pilot in I photographed myself wearing suitable clothing and head gear (as close as I could get given a budget of zero). I created an additional layer with the rear part of the cockpit which went behind the image I shot of myself as the pilot, which itself went behind the main image of the aircraft. I tend to use bright red as my background layer when I'm cutting out as this sticks out and makes it easy to see the bits which will be transparent when I switch this layer off. The propellor was given its own layer (i.e. cut out and the background it was obsuring recreated) and a radial blur added to make it look like it was moving.

The sky was again one from my collection, but much more simple than on the Me262 as I wanted the focus to be on the P51 plane.