These are aircraft that spent the night at ABIA airport in Austin Texas and are ready to start work as the sun is about to rise.
Although I am a full time photographer, I also work part time for an unnamed airline (guess…). Some days I am greeting customers in my white shirt and tie, and on many days I’m working the ramp in my ‘village people’ outfit and get to watch the sun rise while towing the aircraft to the gates so all those travelers can fly to where they want or need to be. I’ve always been like a kid around airplanes so while the work is sometimes hard, for me the hours are short and for the virtual donation of my time I can fly pretty much any where in the world for less than the cost of a good dinner out.

The last time I was in Jackson Hole Wyoming this great storm swept across the Grand Tetons. I shot some photos of the storm but never really liked any of the images. For me, these images just didn’t pop. At first, I felt they were all too monochromatic. The colors were all too muted for my taste. If anything is obvious about me from looking at my images, it’s no real secret that I like chroma. I think it is because it’s the way I see the world. It was a grey stormy day, but my images just didn’t reflect the scene the way I remembered it. Also it was before I shot virtually everything in brackets from a tripod in case I wanted HDR post processing as an option for the images. So, the images just sorta sat on my hard drive waiting to be rediscovered. When I ran across this image today I had a bit of an epiphany; Since the image is somewhat monochromatic, make it truly monochromatic. And so, by pulling out all the color and with a bit of dodging, burning & contrast enhancement, I was finally able to have the photograph more closely match the image in my memory.