It's also that the U2 was developed by Lockheed Skunk Works on a $22.5 million contract, where they delivered 20 working aircraft in less than 2 years from project start and went $3.5 million under budget. They paid back the money. And as a bonus deliverable, the team also developed a new testing site with extra long paved runway, hangars, workshop etc. on a salt flat known as Area 51.
1. Satellites can now conduct imagery intelligence at a similar or higher quality without alerting targets, conducting refueling, or risking pilots.
2. There are more satellites with higher maneuverability than before.
3. Unmanned high altitude drones will replace the existing U-2S role in the next decade or so; or already have. Consider the U-2S role in the Chinese balloon incident. The military wanted intelligence on the balloon that would not otherwise come from a satellite and therefore utilized the U-2S.
Consider what satellite imagery was like six decades ago. The CORONA program used massive and complex satellites to take photos on film reels, then jettison and recover them using parachutes and catch them on a hook from an aircraft. Yes, really. Back then, it was much more effective to send a plane over and take some images manually.
Very soon after, even as early as the mid 70s, digital image processing and transmission made these obsolete with the launch of the KH-11 series. By this point, it was substantially faster, cheaper, and more reliable to use satellite imagery rather than spyplanes for general purpose surveillance.
The other thing to consider is the rise of surface to air missiles and air defense systems. These greatly changed the calculus of manned surveillance flights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
These old airframes do get incremental upgrades to software/avionics/engines etc, and there is actually a SR-72 in development as a UAV.
Regarding the aircraft comparison: the U-2 is surprisingly cheap to operate. It's brilliant. The SR-71 pretty much pegged the meter in terms of operating cost.
It's really only when an aircraft can no longer be upgraded or its mission no longer exists and can't be adapted easily for another one is when it's retired.
Good grief, is reality really that shitty?
These pictures don't have bad HDR artifacts (EG haloing) but even a casual observer will notice they don't feel natural at all. It's a shame because the framing and colors of those pictures are really nice, but the contrast (both high and low freq) gives them a completely synthetic feel. I'm guessing the sky was swapped out with a very dramatic overcast version, which also adds to the uncanny valley effect.
Part of the article stipulates that much of the plane is still classified to a certain extent, it could be possible that there were requirements to not show too much detail. That would lend to the highly stylized look to being used. I'd have assumed some photoshopping to paint over areas that needed redacting.
What processing are you referring to?
Especially in the ground pictures, a lot of work was done on the global/local contrast to achieve detail across the brightness range. In addition, manually brightening and darkening some of the areas to guide the eye. These are things photographers have always done since the early days of photography - however with modern tools, it's easier to achieve a look that goes too far, and starts coming off as "synthetic" or "video-gamey".
I also think they just did a swap of the sky in some of the dramatic cloudy shots.
an example of the postprocessing can be seen in the first photo, where the yellow painted flight line is glowing in the dark
Looking at his portfolio it seems like he his better at photoshop than at taking photos.
Most photographers alter the raw photograph data.
It is known, but when the end picture looks like a playstation 3 game trailer it's not everybody's cup of tea
Or in 2023 we can call it 'midjourney look'. Whatever the name, it looks cheap to many. Hardly the effect desired by author.
No one I knew that I worked with preferred blues over BDUs. One would wear blues only if absolutely required.
'In the early 2000s the Army attempted to come up with a Unified Field Theory, not for physics but for camouflage uniforms: they wanted one pattern that would hide troops in the woods, city streets and the desert. The uniform designers and engineers came up with 13 patterns for testing. But before the results were in, a general went ahead and picked a pattern—one that was not even among the 13 agreed-on contenders. “The new camouflage performed so poorly in Afghanistan that in 2009,” Roach notes, “the Army spent $3.4 million developing a new and safer pattern for troops deployed there.”
Meanwhile the Navy currently wears blue camouflage as its working uniform. “I asked a Navy commander about the rationale,” Roach recounts. “He looked down at his trousers and sighed. ‘That's so no one can see you if you fall overboard.'”'
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/author-mary-roach...
At that height, the horizon would appear nearly as a perfect straight line. With a pinhole camera, it would be projected as a straight line in the image plane. Thus, the curvature here has to do with the wide-angle geometry of the lens. If the camera was pointing higher, you would see the horizon curved in the other direction (which would look even cooler!).
One of the coolest aspects of the photos to me is the way you can see terrain in a fairly typical aircraft view underneath and still see the curvature of the horizon toward the edges.
Since it's on a photography-centric site, I was a little disappointed there was no discussion of the camera gear or lens selection. I was also hoping to see camera EXIF metadata alongside the images which would typically reflect lens type, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, etc.
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.
I kind of feel bad of the photographer, but I think his style has is probably collateral damage of generative "AI." I literally did not believe his photos were real, because the uncanniness and the subject matter just screamed AI-generated to me. Especially that photo of the pilots in the space suits. A lot of the night shots of the plane also looked like renders.
It's almost like it's too easy to fake cool, which then devalues cool, so to be believable someone an artist almost has to miss the mark in just the right way.
There's probably a deeper point there, but I can't make it.
Are there good explanations for why AI generated pictures tend to emulate this particular post-processing style? Is it a simple matter of choice of training data, or does it have to do with the "unnatural smoothness patterns" of the generated (or in the article's case, post-processed) image?
Apart from that, I find it quite surprising that this is the first photoshoot. Isn't U2, first and foremost, a high altitude photography platform? Sure, they probably mostly cared about photographing the surface of the planet, and perhaps the plane's (fixed) equipment was even such that it could only photograph the surface. But did no one pilot, co-pilot, etc. ever care to try and take pictures with even a humble consumer camera in a U2?
Finally: could the post-processing style have been chosen on purpose to hide details which are (for whatever reason) still "sensitive information"?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#Specifications_(U...
This website calls itself "petapixel" yet the images are thumbnail sized.
