The ultimate pull-back
Get as far away as possible
Does it seem a bit like cheating to include aerial photography here? It’s normally thought about in a different way, as its own specialized form, but it’s also by far the most detached and distanced way of shooting. It comes with the same cautionary note as the two other kinds of distanced shooting that I just showed, and while most of us tend to think of it as a desirable opportunity to be relished – having your own aircraft for an hour or two – there’s another point of view, as I remember from an assignment in the Philippines with many other photographers for a book.
I was flying back to Manila with Bruno Barbey and we were comparing notes on how the previous week had gone, which wasn’t well. Some years before, I’d had a military helicopter for three days over the Sulu Sea, which had been amazing, and I was quite envious of the assigned aerial photographer in our group, Yann Arthusbertrand. Bruno surprised me by having no interest in that: “Everything’s too far away. There are no people, no emotion, no life.” This was yet another way of expressing the basic divide among photographers between detachment and restraint on the one hand, and involvement and closeness on the other. Bruno’s view, which I have a lot of sympathy for, is the classic reportage one, but at the same time I can’t shake off the attraction of the grand view and the possibility of making unusual and graphic images.
With very few exceptions (among rugged mountains and chasms) depth of field isn’t an issue, because to all intents and purposes all of your subjects are at the same distance from the camera. It’s a little like photographing a piece of flat artwork, except that it’s a living one, and while there are several different styles of aerial shooting (think Yann Arthus-bertrand, Georg Gerster, Joshua Jensen-angle and… oh yes, Ed Burtynsky pops up here as well as earlier), the key to successful aerial imagery is the graphics. Abstraction, unusual colour combinations, lines and patterns and shapes – these always seem to have instant audience appeal.
The recent challenge to this appeal is overfamiliarity, because aerial photography has long depended on the unexpectedness of how things look from the sky, and drones are now challenging that by sheer volume of imagery. Nevertheless, drones are fun, and have opened up a whole new kind of viewpoint – the low-level aerial – but for personal satisfaction, there’s
nothing to beat using a camera as you normally would, but doing it from an aircraft with no glass or plastic between you and the ground. Fixed wing is fine, but a helicopter is heaven, and costs, as you might expect, a fortune. I recently did a book on the French island of La Réunion, which has some of the most spectacularly deep, physical landscapes I’ve seen anywhere, a mixture of recent and currently active volcanic terrain, for which only a helicopter will do.
Every minute counts, not only for the cost but because of the uncertainty of the weather conditions and, if you fly early in the morning, the steady loss of interesting light and shadows as the sun rises. If you get the opportunity, rule one is to make sure in advance that you can either open a window or pull back a door so that you have a clear view. Rule two is to stay focused and find a few to several good camera positions on the flight rather than waste time snapping away at everything.
A helicopter is above all a camera platform, so it’s worth taking the trouble to get the pilot to put you in a perfect hovering position. “Could you back up a bit, Patrick?” I asked the ex-military pilot as we hovered inside the collapsed crater of Mafate, with its sharp fins and peaks. He span the helicopter around 360 degrees. “Just checking what’s behind us”, he said. Good job too, as a vertical rock face crossed
in front of me only a few metres away. This image was shot in much less expensive circumstances, over Yellowstone National Park, from a single-engined Cessna banked as it circled around a fixed point – above the aptly named Grand Prismatic Spring, demonstrating well the value of distance. From the boardwalk around the circumference, just visible in this shot, you wouldn’t imagine that it looks like this from two thousand feet.