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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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.
Luckily for us, he still went ahead and created the video, publishing it to his Vimeo stream with the title “Perseid Meteor Shower Failure“. Even though you don’t get to see much of the Perseid meteor shower, the video offers a breathtaking view of the Earth rotating and airplanes shooting across the sky. Meteor shower fail. Timelapse win.
The first part of the video was captured with a Canon 20D and intervalometer, while the second part was shot with a Canon 5D Mark 2 and Sigma 20mm f/1.8 at f/2 and 30 second exposures on continuous shooting mode with the shutter depressed.
Fujifilm’s Instax Mini 7S landed a pretty prominent spot in hip hop artist B.o.B’s music video for “Airplanes,” featuring Hayley Williams. It seems like instant photo marketing is especially seeking exposure through music videos — Lady Gaga’s “Telephones” also contains a hefty 10-second spot for Polaroid’s instant camera.
