It’s fall, that glorious time of year we can celebrate gorgeous light and the fruits of our year’s labor. Fall is often celebrated with bright oranges, reds and yellows. There are other colors of fall, other symbols of the season we can take advantage of when staring down back at earth. Many crops are harvested this time of year, their green fields turning that sweet amber brown. I like to go up looking for that in some locales like in North Dakota. That’s where this photo mission was accomplished with the beautiful Monocoupe 110. I sent the Monocoupe lower to almost 750AGL and zoomed the lens out. I wanted to take in visually more of Earth while keeping the image size you see. It’s a simple technique you can use anytime of year, one I like to use, looking for the other fall colors.

In the launching and recovery of an amphibious aircraft, they have to get on step. In the simplest of terms, they need to have a minimum amount of the float dragging in the water. They do this when taking off and they do it after landing and “taxing” to where they want to beach. It’s these two times you can get this kinda shot. Now you’re shooting at a slower shutter speed to get the prop blur. The problem is the plane is “skipping” across the surface, so along with the prop blur, you can get plenty of fuselage blur as well. But that’s the challenge and fun of coming and going!

Shooting up on this Sea Fury, you can’t see the kangaroo emblem on the side of the fuselage. Take a guess at what country paints a kangaroo on their fuselage? Now look at the photograph. Could the Sea Fury be flying in those skies? Of course, because clouds are universal. You have no clue it was actually flying over the skies of California’s Central Valley. When you need to tell their story accurately but the earth below isn’t it, head to the clouds. Cause that can be anywhere in the world.

The Cessna 195 is a favorite aircraft of mine. I saw this one years ago at a Fly-in and as good fortune would have it, years later, I became good friends with its owner. I went to his home in Calgary after reading Wings of Mercy to learn more about the role of this individual aircraft. My end goal was to bring this story to your attention in an article that was just published in Vintage Magazine.

The morning of the flight was picture perfect, clear air and great light. We launched at sunrise and had a marvelous hour in the air over the northern Rockies. There was just one issue, it was the wrong side of the plane! Your basic A2A flight is the photo platform/photographer in the right seat photographing the subject plane and its pilot on the left. The issue was, the SAS emblem is on the right side of the plane! The heart of the story wasn’t part of the visual story. Yikes! We believe they put it on that side so when loading patients, there was no mistake it was the air ambulance. Well, that problem needed to be corrected so we needed to go up again!

There is one certainty of an A2A, the clean sensor you started with will be filthy in the end. Dust is forced in from the open door finding its way onto the sensor. So I changed bodies, looked at flight maps to plan an afternoon flight and waited for the sun to move across the sky. We got the shots, which include the cover on that afternoon flight, and had a great time, truly a great time! And I learned one very important lesson, photograph the correct side!

I first saw it in the hangar tucked in amongst the warbirds. It immediately caught my attention and that’s when I learned about Bob and his plane. Now a dear friend, his love of aviation can be seen in his plane. It started as a “kit” but it’s not a kit you’d pick up at your local hobby store. The precision of the craft Bob put into his Starduster Too was recognized at Osh with his winning of the Golden Wrench. I’ve always thought of the Starduster Too as summer. That’s because in the winter, it’s well below zero, not great flying time. In the spring, it’s time to tend to the fields as it is in fall. So Bob flies the most in the summer. Great plane, great guy, the Starduster Too, it is summer!

Yeah, August light is simply a challenge, especially at midday. The issue is simple, the range of light is huge, creating either nasty highlights or deep, dark shadows. Shooting B&W is one way to work in this light, lots of drama. Knowing the pilot and meeting him at MSO as they flew cross-country, I made the most of the opportunity. I prearranged for Addison to park right next to the closed hangar door of the Museum of Mountain Flight with the Speedmail pointing towards the sun. He was kind enough to do just that. Then I shot from a low angle. The hangar door bounced light into the fuselage, the strong side light provided direction and shape and the low angle minimized dark shadows. Not a super romantic photograph, but it’s darn clean. It’s just one way to work with that hot August Light.