Two pilots and a pair of photographers teamed up to create what they are describing as a "once-in-a-lifetime" set of photos featuring two planes passing through the last solar eclipse in North America for 20 years.
"I shouldn’t be here." That’s all I could think as I brought my camera to my eye to frame a shot overlooking the massive expanse of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. I was in a Robinson R44 Raven II helicopter, the door removed at my request. The sun had barely risen over the north Texas landscape as we approached what is typically one of the busiest airports in the world.
Over the last few years, there have been some infamous incidents of airports being shut down and flights grounded because a camera drone was spotted nearby. But these accidents have given a group of climate activists an idea: in two weeks, they plan to fly drones inside London Heathrow's no-fly zone as a "symbolic action," possibly shutting down the world's 7th largest airport.
Airports is an ongoing project by photographer Pete Mauney, who spends hours shooting long exposure photos near airports. He then combines the photos to create mesmerizing composites in which the night sky is filled with airplane light trails.
Life Cycles is a new project by photographer Mike Kelley, who documented the creation, use, and destruction of airplanes through top-down photos captured from the sky.
Back in 2014, we shared an impressive composite photo by Mike Kelley that combined 8 hours of airplane takeoffs at LAX into a single frame. After the viral success of that photo, Kelley decided to take the idea to major airports around the world. The resulting project is titled, Airportraits.
Here's a video that's going viral on the Web right now: Korean YouTuber MichealHrd shared this short video showing the power of a 200x camera zoom. You can zoom in on an airplane cruising by overhead and read the name of the airline on the side.
A video posted by Paul Luning (@pluning) on Feb 14, 2015 at 9:45am PST
Maho Beach in the Caribbean islands is famous for being a place where you can stand directly under airliners as they're landing at Princess Juliana International Airport. With giant airplanes roaring so close overhead, the beach is a popular photo spot that results in some unbelievable images.
Photographer and travel blogger Paul Luning recently paid a visit to the beach, capturing the eye-opening video above that shows just how close the planes come to the people on the beach below.
When we finally build a warp drive (or, you know, whenever the aliens see fit to give us one), this time-lapse is what we imagine a warp-speed airport would look like in real-time. Planes blasting away to our outposts in Andromeda, leaving long streaks of light in their wake.
But until then, we'll just have to be content with this beautiful time-lapse in which Milton Tan gives us an incredibly close look at the comings and goings at Singapore Changi Airport... like restricted area close.
The video above is going viral, and as soon as you watch it, you'll understand why. Filmed Thursday by a Vancouver man named Dwayne Stewart, it shows how a couple of Air Canada baggage handlers 'handled' the carry on luggage that had to be gate-checked because it wouldn't fit on the plane.
In search of a difficult photo project? Try photographing airplanes passing in front of the sun and the moon. That's what French photographer Sebastien Lebrigand set out to do earlier this year, and his resulting photographs are incredible.
The San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is one of the world's 30 busiest airports. The "gateway to the Pacific," as it is sometimes called, handled over 44 million passengers last year alone, and it was even the subject of its own short-lived television series back in the 1970s.
Given its scale and the sheer amount of air traffic that goes through there, YouTube user craigiest decided to give us a glimpse of the airport's comings and goings by shooting the above time-lapse.
In the majority of time-lapses, airplanes wind up being an unintended byproduct. Sometimes they get downright distracting, like in this time-lapse where an airplane in a holding pattern was thought to maybe be a UFO.
But photographer Milton Tan doesn't find them distracting, he finds them fascinating. So much so that he's created an entire time-lapse that focuses on the identified flying objects exclusively.
For his project "Happy End," German photographer Dietmar Eckell has travelled all over the world to find and photograph abandoned airplane wreckages with positive endings. That last part may seem like a paradox, but all of the 15 wreckages Eckell has shot actually do have happy endings: no one on board died, and they were all rescued from the remote locations where they crash landed.
Now, after completing this mammoth project and producing some extraordinary pictures, he wants to put together a coffee table photo book that tells and (obviously) illustrates these stories, and he's turned to crowdfunding site Indiegogo for help.
Jeffrey Milstein has two huge passions: photography and aviation. For his project Aircraft: The Jet as Art, Milstein visited airport runways between 2005 and 2009 and created large-scale photos of various aircraft at the precise moment they passed directly overhead.
Photographer and film professor Cy Kuckenbaker scored a viral hit in December 2012 with a clever video showing five hours of airplane landings condensed into a 30-second composite time-lapse. That video has been viewed more than a million times over the past couple of months.
Kuckenbaker tells us that he just released a second companion piece -- one that shows 90 airplanes in 30 seconds rather than 60.
Check out this curious 25-second time-lapse/composite video that shows every airplane that landed at San Diego International Airport on Black Friday a week ago between 10:30am and 3pm. The giant planes whiz by overhead as if they're part of a fighter jet squadron heading off to battle -- not something you'd expect to see with commercial planes at an airport. It was created by photography and film professor Cy Kuckenbaker.
Martin of Cargospotter created this mesmerizing time-lapse video showing the constant stream of airplanes that land on a particular runway at London's Heathrow airport, the third busiest airport in the world in terms of passengers (Atlanta Airport tops that list -- did you know that?). The still photographs he captured are played back 17-times faster than real-time, causing the planes to look like RC airplanes floating around and bobbing in the breeze.
Maho Beach outside of Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten is famous for the fact that landing airplanes fly overhead at minimal altitude. It's one of the only places in the world where airplanes can be viewed in their flightpath just outside the end of the runway, and therefore is very popular with tourists and plane spotters. Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner has a project titled "Jet Airliner" that consists of photos of massive jet airliners hovering over the heads of sunbathers on the beach.
Australian PhD student Hamish Innes-Brown lurked around Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne and shot these beautiful photographs of airplanes landing using a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera and Kodak Portra 160NC medium format film.
Sit around long enough near an airport and you can shoot photos like these -- stacked long-exposure images that make airplanes look like fireflies streaking around the night sky. Flickr user Terence Chang visits various locations around the Bay Area to capture these photographs of San Francisco International Airport.
Vimeo user ph dee went out to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park last night after hearing that it's a great place to watch meteor showers. After spending four hours shooting frames for a Perseid meteor shower timelapse video, he discovered that the heavy air traffic in the area dominated the scene.
Fujifilm’s Instax Mini 7S landed a pretty prominent spot in hip hop artist B.o.B’s music video for “Airplanes,” featuring …