USAF Heritage Flight - P51 and F16

One of the Air Races non-race activities this year was a flight by the F16 Viper Demonstration Team, and as a part of that show is a fly by of the Falcon with an aircraft from the USAF history.  In this show, it was with a P51 Mustang.
For me, it is one thing to see the F16 demo flight, which was awesome,  and see the P51s in the races.  It is altogether a different sight to see the two craft together.  See kids, history can be fun.
Photographically speaking, two things.  There won't be many more memories I will have from this event that what I saw here.  Sure, the races are fun, interesting and exciting.  To me however, this is another level.  And the fact I could capture the image is even better.  I won't mention that there were four shows, one a day, and after the first I knew what was coming.  Still, there was room for error.  The other thing, I'm always amazed at what light, glass and electronics will capture.  It is tough to tell how far away I am from the subjects, but through all the photography elements the pilot of the F16 is really very visible.  That is just awesome.
The only 'touch ups' I did was to add some light to the F16 tail as it was dark due to sun position.  There were also sun reflections on the canopies of both aircraft.  Again, due to the distance involved, to get the final image I'd be happy with I need to crop a little more than I'm used to.  With the crop, it has to fit as a screen saver on my 24 inch monitors, that's the test.
From the original image, the blown sun reflections:

I was surprised a bit by how much the light objects impacted the image.  All were very small, but they were eye catchers.  For the sun reflection on the canopy, I used the Content Aware Fill process.  In this case, surprisingly it worked very well.  I used the same process for the very light object inside the cockpit.  I used a small clone adjustment for the sun reflection on the pilot's helmet.

As part of my post processing, I also hit the image with a bit of smoothing.   The 'perfect' sky wasn't so perfect to me.  It these two close ups, you can really see the noise in the original image and in the processed image, not so much.
Usually when I process my photos, I go from the original 300 PP to 150 PP.  It used to be for image file size considerations.  I could very rarely tell the difference.  But for this image, I was going to crop off a lot more than I usually do.  So I kept the 300 PP and saved at a higher JPG resolution.  Seems to have worked.  From what I can tell, it will work on my monitors, and that's the final test.
The final image.

ISO 800, f/6.3, 1/6400 sec, 450 mm

To my 'critic' friends who would say something along the lines of nice photograph, but if you were really any good, you wouldn't need that shutter speed.  In fact, if you were to slow it down to 1/100th, maybe you'd get some prop blur.  Maybe, but at this angle the prop blur or lack thereof isn't noticeable.  But I'll keep it in mind for next year.