Now, over several shoots, I seem to be acquiring a great many aerial pictures of this one island: Martha's Vineyard. Why? Well, I suppose partly because I am already there but more importantly it is still surprising and I am still learning from it. Perhaps this is the way I can make pictures that are good and satisfy from the island. I know that shooting on the ground here is much more difficult for me.

Gyro battery charged? Check. Camera battery charged? Check. Camera set for shutter priority and 1/1600 of a second? Check. ISO set? Check. VR off on lens? Check. Card empty? Check.

This is part of the mental checklist I go through when getting ready to shoot aerials, which I did this morning at 8 am. On one of the hottest May thirty-firsts I can remember we took off from the Katama Airfield on a grass strip in a Cessna 172 on Martha's Vineyard. Sliding up the South Shore I shot from the inland looking out towards the ocean:

Then, as we flew farther up island, we turned inland near Herring Creek and I made some exposures with no ocean in the frame:

The ponds on the island are everywhere, mostly small but some quite large.

Then we turned and made two runs from the cliffs at Gay Head down the beach from Philbin on down to Squibnocket. This is where, as teenagers, we would have beach parties, sometimes sitting around camp fires to keep warm. In those days you could get a Jeep in there, if you knew where to turn off the paved road. This is the region we called Zack's Cliffs and it was where the biggest dunes on the island were and still are. Much of it is Kennedy/Onassis land now.

This is an area of such sublime beauty it is difficult to comprehend. It is where my job is hugely simple: to just keep it together, to point the camera as we slide by, to click the shutter at the right moment but not to intrude myself into the picture at all, just let what is there 800 feet below me get taken in by the lens, absorbed by the sensor and held as a still picture to look at later, to have, to hold, to keep and to use as a way to be brought back to this transcendent slice of time, hovering over these dunes, this water, this beach and this land. Perfect.

Next up? Once Again Part 2, of course.

I flew over the Imperial Sand Dunes in Southern California again a couple of days ago. I had shot aerials there about this same time last year. Why photograph them again? Read on.

It's a good question and raises bigger issues than just another hour of photographing a year later.

As always, I will provide a little background and context. Last year the Dunes were a discovery of major proportions for me. They are 48 miles of dunes that reach from not far from the Salton Sea all the way down into Mexico. Much of the dunes are accessible via off road vehicles by permit. As we who live on the coasts go to the beach, people in this area go to the dunes. Weekends are frenetic and can be quite dangerous as all types and all ages with all types of all terrain vehicles criss cross the dunes, sometimes at great speed. People are killed every year. And these vehicles leave tracks. But, just as the wheat fields change due to the seasons the dunes change due to the winds. The area is known to have sandstorms and this scrubs the dunes clean of tracks and moves the sand around, just like snow drifts. Last year I made pictures in and of the dunes every way I could figure out. This included parking and walking in a ways, going out in the dunes in a jeep, flying over them and even renting an ATV for a day, trailering it in and driving it up into the dunes. The pictures that came out of that effort are here: Dunes 2012.

This year I just made pictures from above:

I wrote earlier (Aerials) about how to photograph from the air and won't repeat it here except to say that it is intense and I was nervous before flying this time as I am every time.

So why photograph material again that I just photographed last year? Because there was more to do. Each time I fly to photograph, it is just one hour. This is a cost thing and a "how much can I possibly do?" thing. One hour is really short to make a substantive body of work and there was no way I got it all in one hour last year. So I felt as though it needed more attention and hoped many variables would come together and lean in my favor this year to make a contribution to last year's body of work. Secondly, I wanted more file. I used a different camera this year and the newer one makes a bigger file. This after I've preached that the camera makes little difference? Well, it does if you believe the image needs to be printed large and well. That is the case here.

The larger issue is when do you know that you need to go back and when do you know you're done? Gut, intellect, research, some serious looking over what you've done, seeking advice, showing the work to others, letting the work settle a little in your estimation of it and being in touch with your feelings, i.e. is it calling you? Do you find yourself thinking of being back, thinking of what else you might do, how you might add to what's been done? There it is.

Over the next few days I am going to shoot out several more posts as, believe it or not, I've got too many back logged entries waiting to go out. Hang on and remember no one ever said you had to read them all. I know I know these retired guys with so much time on their hands. Well, I am not so very much retired yet, am I?

This is the second in a series of posts about the wheat pictures I've been making since 1993. In this one we'll take a look at the color 8 x 10 pictures I began making in 2001 and then finish with early aerials.

By 2001 I had made pictures in the Palouse region of Washington for several years.  I would fly out from Boston where I live, rent a car, book a motel, and spend most days on dirt farm roads looking for things to photograph with the 8 x 10 camera. Most trips were for ten days or so. In 2001 I brought with me ten sheets of Fujichrome Provia color transparency film. This was big. Why? Because for the previous thirty years all my photography had been in black and white. 

That summer I shot the 10 sheets of the color slide film and underexposed all 10 sheets. Clearly, if I was to work in color in 8 x10 I needed to get my shit together. So over the next nine months while teaching I practiced, shot film and worked on understanding color exposure and filtration better. By the time I was headed back to Washington to photograph in the summer of 2002 I felt confident I knew what I was doing.I shot about 50 sheets of Fuji that trip.So here I was photographing the fields in color and black and white too, although I was now less interested in those. I was interested in photographing wheat in color because color was fundamental to where I was and hugely different depending on when I was there. What also happened, of course, was that color started to slip into all the shooting I was doing. I was even shooting color series work in 120mm the way I had shot series work in black and white for twenty years. In short, big changes were afoot as the old rules no longer applied. There have been many things that have happened over my career that have reinvigorated my photography. Color at this time was one of them.

There's a catch and that is that there really wasn't a way to realize the color I was shooting in any high quality manner. Inkjet printing simply wasn't good enough yet, I hated C prints as they looked plasticky and veiled, Cibachromes were expensive and the chemistry was very bad. About the only way to see these was to print them at school using the Fuji printer we had, which used two rolls to make a print: a receiver sheet and a transfer sheet. It was good but the downside was that the printer only printed to 11 x 17 inches and each time you made a print it cost about $15.

It wasn't really until about 2003 or 2004 that I was able to realize these 8 x 10 inch transparencies as good prints that were large enough. I had several shows in those years at Studio Soto Gallery in Boston that highlighted this work. The prints were typically 4 x 5 feet and were inkjet prints.

Early Aerials

Since there is room I'll move now into telling about the early days of shooting the wheat fields from the air. I'll conclude this series of posts in Wheat 6 with more current aerials.

One of the trips I took out to the Palouse in the late 90's had me flying to Seattle and then flying back east to Pullman on a small turbo prop plane. This meant we were flying over much of the country I had been shooting from the ground. As the plane was low enough and it was clear enough I had a look for the first time at what the area looked like from the air. I decided then that I should see if I could  find a way to make some aerial photographs of the fields. 

A few days later I met Doug Gadwa. He owned a small air charter business at the Pullman airport. He told me he could take me up for an hour or so and that he had a Cessna high winged plane that had a removable back seat with a small plate in the floor that could be unscrewed. This would allow me to shoot straight down.

The only camera I had with me that might work was the Hasselblad Superwide (SWC). The next day, up we went. They had removed the rear seat for me and I lay on my stomach in front of a 4 inch square hole in the floor, looking straight down. I could either look through the hole to the ground sliding by us below or stick the camera in the hole to take a picture, but couldn't do both at the same time.

This is what the pictures looked like:

As it turned out the Superwide was a wonderful camera for photographing this way as it was wide and its 38 Biogon lens was very very sharp.

After that trip I began thinking of working aerially as simply being part of the way that I made pictures in Washington. What came next? Color, of course:

OMG! These pictures blew me away. I was so excited (and to be honest, terrified when up in the plane) by this way of working that in later years when I had made the switch to digital it seemed very natural to just make aerials wherever I thought there was the potential for good photographs. This was just as true in Utah in 2010:

as it was in Massachussetts when I got it in my head that I wanted to photograph islands off the coast that were private and inaccessible (MA Islands) in 2009. 

So, where does that leave us in the scheme of the Wheat pictures? Well, there is more story to tell and in the next installment in the Wheat series I'll write about my change from film to digital. We all know that this has been a revolution in how still photographs are made, but in my case moving to digital capture allowed me to make pictures I never could have before.

Wheat 3 coming up next. Stay with me.

Many of you have seen a group of aerial pictures I made last spring of Martha's Vineyard (MV May 2012). This past Friday I made another flight as I wanted to see if I could extend the series. I also wanted to work with late fall colors.

Here are some of yesterday's photographs. The full set are now up on the site (Martha's Vineyard Fall 2012)

(Remember: if you click on an image it will open up a full size slideshow)

I haven't written anything yet about aerial photography. It is its own specialized category of making pictures and I feel like I am late to the party as I've just been shooting this way for a few years. It is surprisingly easy to do logisitally. Go to an airport, find the private aviation area, ask if there is anyone that can take you up for an hour or so, and make sure you are flying in a high-wing plane like a Cessna 172. Helicopters are great but far more expensive. Cessna's are good as they are light, maneuverable, slow and have windows with hinges on the top so that air pressure will hold the window open once you're in the air. It isn't good to photograph through the glass. I usually am charged about $250 for an hour's flight. Of course there are many levels of photographing from the air. If you begin to get serious  about aerials a gyro stabilizer is next up the chain in the pursuit of higher quality. These are expensive but increase the ratio of successful pictures to failures considerably. I regard a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second as a minimum and am always trying to get more depth of field (DOF). You'd think that DOF wouldn't be so important but if you photograph at an oblique angle with a long lens like I do you do need DOF. I used a Nikon D3x for a few years and am now using the Nikon D800E. The primary lens I use is the f2.8 70-200mm VR Nikon lens. 

Yesterday's flight was in flatter light than usual for me and was something of an experiment. Having no shadows and less quantity of light is challenging but the pictures are the reward. Don't eliminate flat light as a way to shoot aerials but just make sure the ceiling is above the altitude you will fly at. Most of the aerial work I do is between 700 or 800 feet on up to about 1500 feet.

Finally, work with the pilot. Besides being tethered to the gyro stabilizer I am also wired into the pilot with headphones and a microphone as it is important to tell him what I am up to and where to go. Very often I will ask him to fly a circle around something or to tilt the wing down so that I can shoot straight down. I've been flying now on the east coast with George Reithof for several years. He is an excellent pilot and is a photographer as well so he gets what I am trying to do. George lives on Nantucket but is willing to fly over to New Bedford or Hyannis to pick me up. He can be reached at: 508-325-8655 or through his site at: Over Nantucket Website. I recommend him without reservation.

When flying in a Cessna you should try to avoid this:That's the wing support strut which I've made many more pictures of than I wanted to.

Got a comment or a question about this post or any others? Until we get a comment section set up on the site you can always email me at: Neal Rantoul's email.