Thursday 3 March 2011

Missing Government UFO files - Using infra Red as a creative editorial tool

The Runway Landing lights at RAF Woodbridge....not a UFO in sight
I'm silly busy today preparing for Focus on Imaging in Birmingham but I simply could not resist posting this rather topical image.......

Now I'm not a big UFO conspiracy theorist but there was an incident in 1980 which is still unexplained.

In 1980 at RAF Woodbridge there was a famous UFO landing incident, which true or not caused quite a stir

Well, the papers on the incident were due for release under the 30 year rule and guess what?

They have gone missing.

Sadly I do not have any pictures of the incident, but 20 years later when I was working for the Sunday Telegraph I was sent to the scene to come up with a creative image to illustrate it.

After several hours driving round the area I was getting nowhere fast, coming up with little other than lacklustre GV's.

Then I saw a guy parked up from a local breakdown company in his tow truck.

Me. 'Excuse me mate, do you know the site of the reported UFO incident

Him.(Smiling) 'Yes, I remember it well'

Me. 'Can you take me there?'

Him. 'Follow me'


So we drove around the perimeter fence of the defunct cold war airfield until we reached a bridleway into the forest.

'It was around here somewhere but I'm not exactly sure where' he said, rather amused at the thought of assisting me in my mission.

So, we had the rough location, how on earth was I to make it look dramatic?

Enter my fun camera the brilliant Canon G2.

While only possessing 4 mega pixels, it was in its day a honey of a camera, in fact I still have it

As well as delivering very good results it had one other quirk - if you used it with a Hoya Infra red filter it gave some pretty whacky fun Infra Red results.

My plant to come up with a light hearted alien inspired shot was hatched.

I put the camera on self timer around my neck and shot these images of Mr Tow truck and I fooling around in the late afternoon light which was casting these silly long shadows, check out the long 'ET' style fingers.

The biggest problem was not laughing and causing camera shake.



4 comments:

photoshopabuser said...

Quick thinking man! I like the effect.

Unknown said...

Hi Photoshopabuser,

I could not resist it.

I have been shooting extensively with IR recently so it was in the forefront of my mind.


Regards

Drew

visualley said...

Top drawer, I can just picture a BTS video with two numpties trying to stand still!

Unknown said...

Hi Graham,

It really was too funny.

Cheers

Drew