See subject.
I followed the link to the 2008 DOD photo site. Same thing.
Revised opinion: call me next time you see eyes and a nose profile in an air to air shot in the evening with cockpit opposite lighting and massive flare illumination in a simultaneous distance focus.
Sure, it’s a photo. The caption on defense.gov reads: “An F-15E Strike Eagle from the 391st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, launches heat decoys during a close-air-support mission over Afghanistan, Dec. 15, 2008. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon.” See if this link works.
It must have been “take photos of flares month” because the next entry includes this photo. The caption on that one reads: “A Belgian military F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft deploys flares during a combat patrol over Afghanistan, Dec. 12, 2008. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon.” Maybe this link will work too.
Staff Sergeant Allmon certainly has a style.
That picture is had some heavy work done…granted, its not bad work to the untrained eye, but the lighting and focus are all wrong.
Allmon strikes again: “A U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft from the 391st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron deploys flares during a flight over Afghanistan, Nov. 12, 2008. The squadron is deployed to Bagram Air Base. DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon.”
I am not an expert in photo editing here but there is a reduced palette in use here…tends to make things look more “cartoonish” than they really are.
I wonder why the F-16 is carrying Sidewinders. Do the Taliban have a big air force I haven’t heard of?
And another Allmon original:Link. “A U.S. Navy F-18E/F Super Hornet aircraft deploys flares during a combat patrol over Afghanistan, Dec. 10, 2008. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon.”
I defer to anyone else’s expertise on what may be artificially enhanced, but “turning aircraft firing flares” seems to be a go-to photo for one combat cameraman.
So I guess it can be useful for bunker busting.
And perhaps they’re anti-air because some rules require having anti-air in a hostile zone and the military tends to be big on doing things because they rules say to do them that way.
Perhaps also to dissuade foreign air forces like China’s and Russia’s from flying over that area. If I were the gov’t of China, Russia or the immediate neighbors, recce flights, dropping LRRPs and establishing listening/radar/communication posts in Afghanistan might be attractive.
F-16s always carry Sidewinders at the wingtips because the aerodynamics suck if they’re gone. Too much imposed drag.
This I want to hear more about.
Expound please. 
Ever see modern airliners with the winglets? Those serve to break up the wing tip vortex created by forwards motion, aerodynamic lift, etc. That vortex creates a huge amount of drag.
The wingtip Sidewinders perform the same function as the airliner winglets on F-16s by virtue of their guidance fins. To a smaller extent, the missile body covers the launch rail which also adds drag.
F-16s out hunting the bad guys will have additional missiles underneath, and the pilots will shoot those first to preserve the wingtip loads.
Cool photos. Certainly dramatic, although I have no reason to doubt they’re genuine. I presume the photographer would be in another jet, just ahead?
Nope! Insanely tall tripod.
This guy is the Thomas Kinkade of aviation.
Now that’s just mean.
I have no doubt that each of those images started life as an actual photograph (or photographs; they might be composites), since I can’t see the military outright lying about something like that. But they’re so heavily processed that they might as well be considered paintings. There are just too many inconsistencies.
For instance, the lack of motion blur indicates a short exposure time, and the plane and landscape both being in focus indicates a small aperture, but there’s still enough light to make out detail in the portions of the landscape in shadow. Speaking of which, the portions of the plane on the right side of the image don’t have enough light to make out detail, even though they should be better-illuminated than the shadows on the landscape, and have the same illumination as the easily-visible pilot. At best, the photographer must have used a camera with a very wide dynamic range, and then locally rescaled the range on the image to highlight the features he considered interesting. More likely, it’s a composite of multiple exposures taken with different settings.
The F-15 in the first picture also has a Sidewinder; one F-18 in a later picture has at least one Sidewinder, and the F-15 in a later picture I linked to appears to have an AMRAAM. I’m guessing there’s a policy about carrying air-to-air missiles, but I don’t know for sure.
The EXIF data shows that it was taken by a Nikon D3 at f/11, 1/500 sec, ISO400, with a focal length of 70mm.
The only thing that looks a little odd to me is the amount of illumination and detail on the pilot’s face, but there could be a secondary light source contained within the cockpit set on a remote trigger. In my opinion, this is probably a single frame and a “real” photograph.
Here is what I believe is the original unretouched photograph. Heck, I think that version looks better than the contrasty over-saturated one.
Anyhow, that seems to lend creedence to my gut feeling that it is a single frame, “real” photograph.
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