An Impossible Picture

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MIflyer

1st Lieutenant
7,152
14,770
May 30, 2011
Cape Canaveral
Forty years ago I would have thought this modern picture would have been impossible. It is from Flight Journal. I did not get the stitching together of the two halves exactly right but the picture is still quite stunning. It would have been all but impossible to believe in 1980 that we could find a reasonably intact P-40B and P-36C and the idea that we could have put them in flying condition would have been insane.

P-36P-40InFormation.jpg
 
I did not get the stitching together of the two halves exactly right but the picture is still quite stunning.

Well I think you've done an amazing job there!
An A3 scan of two A4 magazine pages and you've completely (to my eyes) removed that dark middle centre section which usually has a whitish reflection?
How do ya do it?

Scan0837.jpg
 
The irony of that photo is that my Uncle Charles was a P-40 pilot and my Uncle Jimmy was a P-36 pilot, both at Pearl Harbor that morning.

My Uncle Charles' P-40 was destroyed in the initial attack and he wasn't able to get into the fray and my Uncle Jimmy's P-36 had no ammunition (and no way to arm it) so he too, had to watch in frustration.
 
Nice. This P-40C was a Tomahawk IIB supplied to the RAF, and was transferred to the Soviet Union. Discovered as a wreck in Russia in 1990, it was restored in New Zealand and is seen here in 2011 at its first public outing following restoration. It flies with Rod Lewis' Air Legends collection at San Antonio, Tx.

View attachment 652338IMG_3482
Replica Ju-87 far right?
 
Well, I achieved that miracle of photo manipulation by not doing the hardest part of it. Subscribers get access to an on-line version of the magazine, so I downloaded that, converted it from PDF to jpg, then cropped off the inner white borders using a picture manipulation program, imported them into a new picture and lined them up. The reason that the P-36 matches but the P-40 does not is because you have to shrink the two pictures to exactly the same size and that is not easy to do. They come out of the jpg converter as full magazine sized pages and so will not fit on the cut and paste field without a lot of shrinking. Maybe you could shrink automatically to a standard size, but I do not know.
 
The irony of that photo is that my Uncle Charles was a P-40 pilot and my Uncle Jimmy was a P-36 pilot, both at Pearl Harbor that morning.

A good potion of the USAAF fighter pilots on Oahu had been invited to a pig hunt and roast on the Big Island on Saturday and spent the night there. When word came of the attack they had nothing but an unarmed B-18 with them.
 
Yes, I always have wanted to put open cowl flaps on a Monogram P-40B and needed to see how they really were.
 

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Well, I achieved that miracle of photo manipulation by not doing the hardest part of it. Subscribers get access to an on-line version of the magazine, so I downloaded that, converted it from PDF to jpg, then cropped off the inner white borders using a picture manipulation program, imported them into a new picture and lined them up. The reason that the P-36 matches but the P-40 does not is because you have to shrink the two pictures to exactly the same size and that is not easy to do. They come out of the jpg converter as full magazine sized pages and so will not fit on the cut and paste field without a lot of shrinking. Maybe you could shrink automatically to a standard size, but I do not know.
Thanks Miflyer.
I remain impressed. :thumbleft:
 

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