Ever since I posted Fadin Fast, a whole bunch of emails have come in asking how I got the photo. It is something you all can do! The very first ingredient in getting the photo is establishing an amazing working and personal relationship with a special group of plane owners and pilots. That relationship with your subject, be it person, place or thing is essential cause that’s how YOU become the storyteller. Then it’s having the basics well established along with viable tools, that’s handholding and panning. Then there is an imagination that hooks up with what life is presenting. And finally, putting that together when a pilot says, “Want do you want?”
In this case, I was at a private airstrip for an evening BBQ with a special group of friends. The day’s work was done so to relax and celebrate the great freedom we are so fortunate to enjoy, the Piper J-3 and PA-11 are pulled out, preflighted and take to the air. No ceremony, it’s just what we do and it’s like no other place in the world. You have some of the world’s best pilots showing their craft, you have others teaching and others who just soloed and those who want to all coming together in a celebration of flight. And then there is me, there with my D4s / 80-400VR3 telling the unique story of the evening. Smoke from wildfires in Canada had blown down, filling the beautiful skies with its brown muck.
As the sun tried to set in the smoke, it was set a blaze creating a fireball. One pilot sitting there watching me shoot, asked what all the body English was as the PA-11 went by. I said, “I want a shot of the plane going into the sun, I’m trying to will it over.” With that, Bernie hoped into the J-3 (which I had earlier received my first flying lesson in from him) and said, “We can do that.” And that’s how I got the photo. And now you know how, you can make the same thing happen cause the possibilities for us all are endless!