I took this image of Air Force One way back in 2003 at, what was then known as, Las Vegas McCarran Airport, just as it started its takeoff roll. President George W Bush was on board and had flown in a few hours earlier for, apparently, very short meetings. It was an amazing site. His Boeing VC-25Tail Number 29000 (the slightly newer one), had been parked just off an active taxiway for a few hours. When the entire entourage returned, it took mere minutes to fire up the engines and start the takeoff roll halfway down the active runway.
I had been coming to this specific spot at KLAS for years. I had watched countless planes takeoff just in front of the Excalibur at the end of runway 26R. I had never seen any plane start a takeoff roll halfway down the runway and be well above the Excalibur by the time it cleared the KLAS property fence. It was amazing.
At the time I was using the brand new digital marvel of photography, the Nikon D100 and a super expensive (for me) Nikkor 80–200mm f/2.8 lens. Both the camera and the lens were extremely expensive, and the Nikon D100 was the first Digital SLR of its kind. The specs are insane by today’s standards, but it had a very respectable APS-C 6.1 MP sensor. You couldn’t shoot RAW and JPG at the same time back then, so I just decided right from the start of my DSLR life. After all the debate about RAW back in 2003, I was determined to shoot RAW knowing that someday down the road I might be able to have a better way of editing all those big pixels. Right now I just needed to capture a properly exposed and sharp image.
Fast-forward 20 years, and of course, we do have far better tools in the editing room. The crazy part is how much better it is today, and how much easier it is to get a decent result from just about any RAW image. The image edit on the right above was basically processed by hitting Lightroom “auto” and the image on the left is the original RAW image from 2003, complete with sensor dust spots clearly visible.
Editing a 20 year old NEF RAW file in Lightroom was so ridiculously easy, and at the same time, a JPG file from that same time frame is locked in history with no way to make meaningful adjustments.
That day in Las Vegas was super hot, hazy, and smoggy, with basically no definition in the sky. Colors were dull and muted, but the image was sharp and properly exposed. Lightroom removed much of the mushiness of the image, automatically, made the whites, white, and the navy blue, blue. In fact, it made that image look like what I had envisioned when I shot it image 20 years ago. This is in part from the leap that Lightroom made just this year using meaningful AI features that were impossible in years past.
To me, this just is just a quick reminder that reinforces what it means to shoot in RAW. That is a lot easier today than it was 20 years ago. Data storage is cheap, and almost all cameras shoot simultaneous JPG/RAW images. But it’s still not always the easiest thing to do. The iPhone can now shoot RAW, but my only complaint is it can’t shoot RAW/JPG simultaneously, and that’s one camera where shooting only RAW doesn’t work so well. So, sadly, most all of my iPhone photography is shot via heavily software processed JPG’s. I do love the RAW images from the iPhone, in a DNG file format, but when you want to just take a quick image and text it to someone, the DNG is too cumbersome to deal with.
My encouragement to any new photographer would be to imagine what you want to do with your images 20–30 years from now. You may not know, but creating an archival habit early on in your photography life can be a huge benefit down the road. What are your long-term plans for your photography? You can see my full Aviation Portfolio as well.
