Chapter 7. In the Air
Coney Island in 2006.
ISO 160 f/5 1/2500 200mm
Aerial photography has to be one of my favorite things to do as a photographer. I definitely fell into it—I never knew I was going to become an aerial specialist.
I had a background in sports photography, which involved using long lenses and capturing the moment. With sports, there’s only one chance to capture that key play; you don’t have any second chances. So when I was put up in a helicopter for the first time, I was already conditioned to capture that moment the first time.
Helicopters or planes tend to loop around subject matter, and if you see something happening, you’ve got to nail it on the first try. The wonderful thing about being up in the air is that you have a totally new three-dimensional appreciation of the world, as you see environments that we all see every day on the ground, from a new perspective. I love going up there and finding different geometrical elements—lines, curves, and shapes made by man or by nature.
I find it funny that if you take a picture of a scene from 5 feet away, people will look at it and quickly move on. But if you take a picture of that same scene from 2,500 feet away, people are somehow more likely to stare for a long time and study it. The “Where’s Waldo?” element might be part of the reason, but somehow I think that fascination speaks more to how human beings relate to their environment and how the environment affects them. New York is a good example of that.
The Challenge in the Air
This image speaks a lot to who I am as a photographer. It’s made with a 7.5mm fisheye lens, a highly unusual lens. The camera was actually at the end of a monopod beneath the skids, and if you look carefully on the bottom left, you’ll see a bit of the skid in the frame, given the incredible field of view I had to work with.
You can’t shoot this photograph from the door. I had to place the camera beneath the skids at the end of a monopod. The camera was connected via FireWire to a laptop in my helicopter so I could see what I was shooting, because for security reasons the helicopter couldn’t hover above the Empire State Building.
It was an incredibly physical act and a huge coordination effort between the pilot and me. I was feeling a lot of Gs just grasping the monopod. I had to be precise. A quarter-inch rotation of the monopod clockwise or counterclockwise, frontward or backward—or to any direction—completely messed up the geometry of the frame. And not only did I have to fight the wind, but also I had to perfectly compose the top of the Empire State Building in the center of the frame.
I shot at a time of day that made it tough. There was little light in the city, so I had to nail the exposure to get this to work. I think it’s the perfect marriage of high tech, knowledge of exposure, geometry, and aesthetics.
Aerial photograph of Ground Zero at sunset almost five years after the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks.
ISO 800 f/5.6 1/320 7.5mm
An Intimate Perspective
The first few times you’re in the air, you want to shoot wide panoramic images. What I did is the exact opposite. I took my sports background and shot as tight as I could, because I didn’t see many photographs taken from the air with a 500mm lens.
I don’t just shoot landscapes from the air; I also photograph human beings and their environments—specifically, urban environments. Street-level photography is fantastic and has its place in the photography realm, but aerial photography of people, especially in a city like New York, is special in that it gives you a unique perspective on human beings and their relationship to their environment.
When you think about New York, you see and imagine it from how it looks on the ground, with the tall buildings towering over you. But from the air, you see human beings differently, with a sense of scale relative to the city from above. It helps you to appreciate the three-dimensionality of the city.
What’s absolutely fascinating for me is that there are many times when you’re 2,500 feet above someone, but there is zero potential for interaction because they can’t see you. They can hear the helicopter, but there’s no way to make eye contact. There’s no way for them to feel comfortable or uncomfortable. Yet somehow that removal from them allows you to have a unique interaction, because you can see them and their relationship to the world in a way they could never imagine.
You can get lost in that world. When I look at photographs of people taken from the street level, I don’t find myself studying their clothes or body language as much as when I look down from the air. I study what people are wearing, what they’re reading, what they’re doing, how they lay their body on the ground. It says a lot about them. It says a lot about their class, about how tensed or relaxed they are as human beings. I see how they interact with others, if they keep their distance or cuddle up with other people. I find it to be a very fascinating sociological study of human beings.
Shooting Tight
Due to my sports photography background, I tend to shoot very, very tight from the air. Most of the time I’m shooting with a 200mm, 300mm, 400mm, or 500mm lens, and these allow me to isolate little parts of the geometry as I compose, to get very rectangular images, and to look for those special images, the golden nuggets. When you’re up in the air you see everything, and the challenge is to pick that one little section that just sings.
This image over Coney Island captured just the right ratio of the number of people in one frame relative to the beach and the size of the frame. It was a challenge because I was doing this while we were flying at well over 70 miles an hour.
Coney Island in 2006.
ISO 160 f/5 1/2500 200mm
Sometimes I ask the helicopter pilot to hover, but in this case I didn’t want to create too much noise. And with so many people below us, safety was just as important a consideration. If you want to remain safe, you want to keep moving.
So I was flying with my head sticking out of the helicopter, trying to frame this as quickly as possible using a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III with a 70–200mm lens. This is the perfect lens for this type of photography: sometimes you want to go loose and sometimes you want to go tight, and when you’re flying faster than 70 miles per hour, it’s tough to debate it and make a decision on the fly.
What I often do is zoom in and out repeatedly until I find that perfect moment. That’s why I find that the 70–200mm is my go-to lens for a good 50 percent of the images that I shoot.
I believe this is an image that you really want to study. It’s one that you could print large on your wall so you could step back and scrutinize every single person—the people walking off the beach, the people in their tents, the people lying on their towels, the kids playing. That’s one of the wonders of still photography, as opposed to video: you can stop and just stare at something and really study it.
Weather and Preparation
Generally I feel comfortable shooting just about any aerial photograph, but there’s one thing that always makes me nervous, and it’s the one thing I have no control over: the weather. This plays an incredibly important part in any aerial photograph.
If it rains, usually you just can’t fly. It’s not safe, and sometimes you can’t see anything. When it’s overcast, it’s 50-50—sometimes it leads to a nice result, sometimes not. Patchy clouds can be great if the subject you want to shoot is in the light.
The one thing that is horrible for flying is a hazy sky. Most of the time if you know it’s going to be hazy, you don’t bother taking off. In this case we had to, and as I often say, “Try to make the best of any situation; try to take a negative and turn it into a positive.” You can see how the haze in this image created a very dreamy quality. This is how I put into practice my approach to do the best I can with what I have at all times.
A strong haze overtakes lower Manhattan as the Empire State Building peeks out slightly in the distance (2006).
ISO 100 f/4 1/600 30mm
But awareness of weather is just one of the important things you have to do to prepare for an aerial shoot. This kind of photography requires a lot of time and money, and you have to do a lot of research to make that kind of investment pay off.
When I photographed aerials in New York, I researched what was going on in the city at that time of year. For example, what time does Rikers Island let out its prisoners for their daily stroll? Are there some fairs going on? Is there going to be an event at Coney Island this weekend?
If it’s an outdoor event, what’s the temperature going to be? If it’s cold or raining, no one’s going to show up. If it’s 85 degrees and sunny, they are going to get slammed. Research is a must.
Coordinating the pilot was also highly intense because every move had to be recorded for the local airports—LaGuardia, JFK, or Newark. You can’t just say, “Stop right here.” You can say, “I would like to stop a mile ahead, and I’d like to hover a few hundred feet,” and the pilot had to clear such requests with the airport. That’s the ultimate in terms of preparing a few steps ahead.
You also have to be aware of the helicopter’s movement, the wind movement, and how you can be positioned relative to the wind. If you have your back to the wind, not only is it dangerous, but also the heat waves fly toward your camera and create blurry images.
Safety is another crucial consideration. When I go up in the air, I usually have a door either off of the helicopter or slid back, and I’m wearing a harness, so I’m strapped into the helicopter. All of the cameras are harnessed to me. So if we hit a bump and I have to let go of the camera to grab onto the helicopter frame for balance, the camera’s not going to go anywhere.
If you’re flying over a very heavily populated area, you want to take every possible precaution to ensure that nothing ever falls out of the helicopter. Nothing should ever be loose in your pockets, and you should never stick your head out with eyeglasses on.
We take safety very seriously. So while it’s easy enough to get into a helicopter, if you’re going do it as a professional photographer, make sure you know what you’re doing and ask other photographers who have done it before.
After all is said and done, it goes back to having one shot at everything, for the most part. To make it work, you learn to think about what the pilot needs to do, what he can and cannot do, what’s safe, and what you need to make your photograph. It’s a high-level dance happening thousands of feet above the ground.
Aerial of the ice skating rink in Bryant Park, 2006.
ISO 800 f/2 1/160 135mm
Benches in downtown Manhattan, 2006.
ISO 200 f/5.6 1/2000 300mm
Asking for Advice
Another piece of advice I have is if you go up in a helicopter, always ask the pilot to let you know if she sees anything special. More often than not, the pilot has flown over that area more than you have, and provides another pair of eyes up in the sky.
For this photo, Rich Carozza, the pilot, saw this image and said, “Hey, Vince, do you see that? Is that interesting?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely.”
These are benches in downtown Manhattan at the Jacob Javits Convention Center Plaza, arranged in beautiful geometrical curves. They’re painted lime green and have a bit of a purple around them.
I shot a little bit looser to include (at the top) the cab and tour bus, which lent a bit of a sense of place. You know you’re not in just any park; you’re probably in New York City. And if you look very closely at the bottom left of the image, you’ll see a woman in a yellow dress. I wanted that little extra touch.
This photo was shot in less than perfect conditions, which can be the case for New York City in July, with its often-murky skies—but I didn’t give up. You can generally pump the contrast up a bit in postproduction and get rid of some of that haze or take a bit of the blue out, and that’s what we did.
I shot a little bit looser to include the cab and tour bus, which lend a bit of a sense of place. You know you’re not in just any park; you’re probably in New York City.
Guests enjoying the relative calm of the roof deck at the Soho House Hotel in the Meatpacking district of New York City (2006).
ISO 100 f/4.5 1/2500 500mm
What you’re trying to do as a photographer from the air is to isolate that geometry in a way that looks beautiful in that two-by-three format.
Using the Graphic Eye
The photograph of the Soho House in the Meatpacking district of Manhattan is a great example of what I’m often trying to do as an aerial photographer. Imagine looking at Manhattan on Google Maps. You’ll see the seemingly endless number of buildings and realize the majority of them are set up in a grid. What you’re trying to do as a photographer from the air is to isolate that geometry in a way that looks beautiful in that two-by-three format.
For this shot, I had this cobblestone street making an L at the top and left side of the image, and then I had this very clean, modern-looking rooftop of a hotel. I think it’s a good study in finding that right balance of elements and paying close attention to the geometry.
Keep in mind that if the helicopter were a few hundred feet off, the geometry would have completely fallen off in the wrong direction. The lines of the top edge of the hotel would not have lain parallel to the top edge of the frame. I had to be perfectly positioned, and that’s what made this very challenging.
Once you’ve framed your image, you can get lost in the details and see the various cars on the streets, and the contrast between the cobblestone street and the clean rooftop. If you look carefully, you’ll see there’s a couple romancing one another at the edge of the pool. For me, those details are what make an image from the air.
Even though you’re 1,500 feet or more above ground and have no direct connection with what’s happening below, you’re somehow able to capture those subtle little moments.
Getting Lucky
Every once in while you get really lucky, and this is one such image.
This is a series of private jets stacked together at Teterboro Airport. I’ve come to call this image “Rush Hour for Billionaires.” It depicts a traffic jam at a small airport, where all these jets were getting ready to leave for a weekend in the Hamptons.
When I saw the jets, I knew I had to find a way to make a unique image. I shot super tight, eliminating the bottom and top parts of the scene. I just had to make sure not to clip the airplanes’ wings. If I had shot this a little wider, the image wouldn’t feel so compact; you would see more of the empty runway or more of the empty airport. It was slammed with planes trying to take every quarter-inch that was left on that tarmac.
That’s the story I was trying to tell with the image, and the long lens compressed everything to make the planes look even more tightly packed together than they were.
If I had shot this a little wider, the image wouldn’t feel so compact; you would see more of the empty runway or more of the empty airport. It was slammed with planes trying to take every quarter-inch that was left on that tarmac.
Private jets embroiled in conjestion at a taxiway at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey (2006).
ISO 100 f/5.6 1/5000 500mm
You’ve got to kind of pick your moments. There’s another shot of a similar scene that I made with a tilt-shift lens at Teterboro Airport. That lens choice resulted in an entirely different feel. Which lens to use is one of the most important decisions you can make when you’re up in the air; other crucial decisions are how tight or how wide to go, and what you want to include or exclude from the frame.
One of the biggest questions I ask myself when composing the photograph is: “What is it that I want inside that frame?” In other words, I need to decide what will add to or detract from the picture. It’s an important rule that I tend to live by.
With a great aerial shot, you want to lure the viewer to take in the details, but creating a sense of place is just as important. I think aerials do that, and that’s why I find them so fascinating.
A tilt-shift lens used to capture the conjested planes at Teterboro Airport (2006).
ISO 50 f/4 1/6000 45mm
