I find it amusing that the photo of the cockpit has 70K feet showing up in the display, which is roughly the unclassified service ceiling:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#Specifications_(U...
Way way way way way too much image processing.
Good grief, is reality really that shitty?
I don't know if HDR that bad should be illegal but it should at least be roundly criticized.
At the risk of joining the tinfoil hat brigade, this is a 70 year old design. The sr 71 is retired and publicly there’s nothing like it. Has aircraft development regressed since the end of the Cold War or are there successors to these craft out there?
HDR looks terrible on those photos. It looks seriously bad.
I think the curvature of the earth on those photos is exaggerated and camera artifacts. If you extrapolate, the earth would be much smaller in these photos.
A subset of those images strongly seem to have been AI-generated.
> 800x534
This website calls itself "petapixel" yet the images are thumbnail sized.
Going to go out on a limb and ask if anyone would do forensics on these 'photos.' There is a pretense here, maybe even aside from the door being green, which might justify a little magic.
Enough of this over-processed junk, bring back Kodachrome
This is really cool, and the photos are almost surreal.
Why do soldiers need to wear green cammo uniforms indoors in meeting rooms?
So many comments here are casual dismissals of the photographer’s style, and while I generally prefer a lighter touch in post-processing, there are some incredibly cool photos in here, some of which are products of interesting light and canopy effects.
I think the artistic decisions make some sense when you consider the purpose of a photo shoot like this. These photos are meant to communicate a story about a mysterious spy plane, and to appeal to a broad audience.
For better or worse, people absolutely eat up this art style, which is why I think many here have been conditioned to associate it with cheap digital filters so ubiquitous on social media. Photos of a famous spy plane can’t be seen as less cool than the latest movie franchise, and so I suspect that’s why the military chose to work with a photographer who works in this style.
Again, not my first choice, but there’s plenty to appreciate in the work, and some of those photos are not as manipulated as one might suspect, and are products of a camera capable of gathering a ton of light even at low exposures.