I have updated my Red Bull Air Force web gallery with new images from a recent shoot with the Red Bull Air Force earlier this year. It has been my privilege to work with these incredibly talented athletes over the last five years on various assignments and this web gallery shows some of the best images I have created while working with them. They push the envelope in ways that few other adventure athletes can match.
For a full report on my latest assignment with the Red Bull Air Force check out my Winter 2014 Newsletter. Below is an excerpt from an editorial I wrote in the Winter 2014 Newsletter, entitled “Separate Reality”:
I have had the privilege of working with an incredible variety of elite adventure sports athletes over the course of my career. To a person, all of the athletes I work with are passionate about their sport and obsessed with pushing their skills and often the boundaries of their sport. As a passionate adventurer myself, I can relate to and understand that passion and motivation. In a sense we are kindred spirits, which is why I have spent the last eighteen years documenting adventure sports and creating adventurous images. But on my most recent assignment with Red Bull I ran into a group of athletes that live in a whole other world. They live in a separate reality from the rest of us.
On a recent shoot with the Red Bull Air Force team, with whom I have shot several times, I was hired to create images of the team in Casa Grande, Arizona, where they had gotten together to practice maneuvers they use when skydiving and flying (in wingsuits) at events around the world. Working with the Red Bull Air Force is always a fun time because these guys are really pushing the envelope and they are a blast to hang out with. Trying to capture the action when shooting with the Air Force team is always extremely difficult because once they jump off the cliff or out of the airplane they are a dot in the sky within one second. For this assignment I was hired to shoot lifestyle images, portraits and the action images over the course of two days. Hence, as you might imagine, these were some very full days.
I don’t exactly know how to explain it, but while shooting with the team this time around, and watching them jump out of the plane, it dawned on me what their perspective on the world, and our place in it, must be given that they can actually fly. To capture action images, I mounted my Nikon D4 on one of the team members helmets and while going through thousands of images shot from his helmet I got a glimpse at what they see, and perhaps some inclination of what they feel, as they fall to Earth. That perspective alone is nothing less than astounding. For them, they are Superman. If I could see that perspective as often as they do, I would rather quickly conclude that nothing is impossible. That is their separate reality!
Above and below are a few screenshots from the updated web gallery.
Note: All of the in-flight aerial images in this portfolio were composed by Andy Farrington, who graciously let me mount my Nikon D4 on his helmet, where it was triggered via an internal intervalometer which fired the camera at 4 fps for the duration of their sky dive.
Check out the updated web gallery on my website.
