In 1858, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, also
known as Nadar, rose 80 meters above the small French village of Petit-Becetre
in a hot air balloon and captured the earliest recorded aerial photograph. Two
years later James Wallace Black repeated the feat on the other side of the
world, taking photographs of Boston from Samuel King’s hot air balloon the
“Queen of the Air.” Other early aerial-photography pioneers experimented with kites
and carrier pigeons to carry their cameras up in the air using a timer to take a
shot over which they had no control.
With the outbreak of World War I, the
development of aerial photography intensified as the images provided useful intelligence
gathering opportunities and by the end of the war purpose-built cameras could
be placed in the floor of military aircraft to capture multiple shot beyond
enemy lines.
Though early aerial photography was
often done for topographic or military purposes, it was elevated to an art form
in the 1950s by American photographer William Garnett who created abstract
works from views of forests and sand dunes, highlighting geometric patterns or
organic shapes that were invisible from the ground.
The advent of drone technology in the
past five years has opened a new chapter in the history of aerial photography and
lowered the entry bar for amateur photographers. “To put costs into
perspective, the cost of about 2 hours of plane hire, or one hour of chopper
hire, will buy you a drone with a built-in camera that can shoot high quality
images.” explains photographer Todd Kennedy, adding “Aside from cost, drones
hover almost perfectly still and are very precise to position. Combined with
the live streaming of the camera's view, you have a perfect tool for shooting photos,
and that includes being able to position the camera anywhere in three
dimensions.”
Timo Lieber: An environmental perspective
From the melt ponds on Greenland’s ice
sheet to the lunar-like landscape of the mineral rich Atacama Desert, Chile,
Timo Lieber is travelling to remote and extreme climatic locations to document
the impact of human activity on our planet. His colourful aerial fine art
photography of unique landscapes warns about the ecological impact of global
warming but also highlights possible solutions, as in the case of his latest
series on the lithium mine fields of Atacama.
“We are seeing a very strong push for
electricity powered engines [which use lithium in their battery], but the jury
is still out on whether it really is the solution we are after or whether we
are replacing one issue with another. I have been following the story of
lithium for a while now and wanted to photograph the Chilean evaporation pools
that form part of South America’s so-called lithium triangle - home to
more than half the known global reserves of the mineral. As with my other
images, I wanted to create beautiful and arresting photos, which would puzzle
the viewer and invite them to step closer and explore," the London-based
German photographer explains.
While his earlier works show the
abstract beauty of vast landscapes, his most recent series have explored human
interaction with nature and the complexity of the impact: "I am personally
attracted to images that are not just visually appealing but also convey a
message I can relate to. My photograph “THAW #1” (of a deep blue lake on the
ice cap of Greenland is a great example in that regard. It looks to me like an
eye, almost as if global warming is looking right back at us."
Lieber got hooked on aerial photography
after a spur of the moment flight in a tiny single-engine plane in Iceland.
“Before we even landed, I knew I wanted to be in the air with my camera as
often as I could. Of course, I made a number of mistakes on those first flights
– quite a few to be honest – but the most important outcome was that I
discovered a way that allows me to express my artistic vision,” he recalls.
Now Lieber’s shoots are often planned
months in advance as flying in remote parts of the world requires meticulous
planning and lengthy negotiations to enter what is often restricted airspace.
For his award winning THAW series, that
draws attention to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the photographer
teamed up with several leading glaciologists from the University of Cambridge
and Aberystwyth University, spending time with them to study their research and
familiarising himself with how best to approach a complex mission on the ice.
Photographing from an open helicopter in
freezing conditions isn’t always fun and preparation is “absolutely key” as you
can’t leave technicalities to chance: “I don’t have a lot of equipment with me
on a shoot but it is all triple checked. As a wise man once put it, ‘a chopper
is a thousand pieces of metal trying to shake themselves apart’ so, I’d better
not forget my camera stabiliser. In the end, I am trusting my life to a harness
and a few ropes to hold me in the helicopter.”
Lieber has only used drones once as a
forced measure in the Atacama Desert, where it was too complicated to
photograph from an unpressurised aircraft due to lower levels of oxygen at very
high altitude. “But I much prefer to be up there myself," he adds. His
dream location: photographing Antarctica. “It would be a natural extension to
the work I did in Greenland. If only the penguins there had some helicopters to
rent."
Antoine
Rose’s Ants World
While many aerial photographers focus on
revealing the beauty of natural or main-made landscapes when viewed from above,
Antoine Rose prefers to focus on observing crowds of people.
His first aerial shoot in 2002 came from
an opportunity to fly over the densely populated beaches of Copacabana in
Brazil to shoot the Kiteboarding World Cup from an innovative angle, and people
continue to be at the centre of his projects, whether on a beach in the United
States or on a ski slope in Switzerland.
“Besides the aesthetic dimension, there
is an anthropological and sociological layer: people sharing common behaviours
and exposing themselves like hedonistic herds. Given the distance, the stills
of people swimming or just sitting down on their beach pads suggests an
insectarium. People seem insignificant dots in the infinite space of the
universe,” he explains.
Rose’s photographs of various beaches
can be seen as a sociological study and a reflection of habits depending on
where they are around the world. Miami Beach has every hotel competing for the
neatest arrangement of chairs and umbrellas, while on Jones beach, a popular
Long Island summer destination for New Yorkers, it’s more about having space
with a very large setup and XXL towels for the whole family and friends. Even
from far above, views of Italian beaches can betray the country’s stylish
sensibilities, the photographer remarks.
Rose says he loves the fully vertical
perspective because it allows him to render figurative scenes as abstracts.
“From a distance, it looks like an abstract painting. It is only when you start
coming closer that thousands of coloured flecks come to life. The pieces of the
puzzle come together and the details of a multitude of everyday situations are
exposed to curious and eager eyes. When looking at these peoples in the
pictures you can let your imagination go.”
Because he prefer densely populate
areas, the self-taught photographer who gave up a marketing job at a Belgian
telecom company to focus on his art, is uninterested in using drones. “The web
is flooded with nice drone photography that are becoming popular. But attaching
a 50,000 euro camera on a drone that could potentially crash and kill someone
on the ground, is not for me. I’m also producing large-sized artworks up to
150x420cm in one piece; you need for that very specific and heavy equipment,”
he explains.
Rose describes himself as a “neurotic
perfectionist” who will work on a shot again and again until he is fully
satisfied: “that’s the only way to stand out of the crowd.” For his “Jeux
d’Hiver” series on the slopes of Saint Moritz, it took four years to get the
six photographs he wanted to show. “All my shoots involve a lot of preparation,
sometimes years in advance, and I never know how the result will look like
until I’m looking at the photos in post-production. I prefer not to release an
average photo and do another shooting attempt instead.”
Such perfectionism can be a heavy
financial investment, but Rose says it does pay off. LVMH acquired four
large-scale works from his “Jeux d’Hiver” series for their luxurious resort in
Courchevel, France, and also commissioned a special artwork.
Rose says he’s hoping to continue his
beach life study with shoots in China where he notes, “not everyone can swim
and usually, you’ll find lots of adults wearing very colourful buoys for
security. It’s really amazing and it would be a great contrast to the
regularity of very clean hotel beaches from Miami.”
Tugo Cheng: Seeking Lines and Patterns
A professional architect by day, photographer
Tugo Cheng hasn’t fail to notice the similarities between his two passions that
keep on feeding from each other. “Architecture
and photography are both pursuing beauty and they share a lot of common
elements such as scale and proportion, light and shadow, colour and texture,
lines and geometries,” says the award-winning Hong Kong-based photographer.
“Architectural training did not only train
my brain eyes, but also my brain as a photographer. We always want to explore
new ideas and perspective and photography is not just about your eyes but also
the imagination and creativity inside. Only when you have good eyes and a
creative brain can you produce good pictures,” he notes.
The exploration of architecture and how
blueprint lines of a building can become more apparent from the sky was the
starting point of Cheng’s 2016 ’City Patterns’ series that revealed hidden and
forgotten geometries in the density-rich urban landscape of his native city.
Highlighting familiar places from an unfamiliar angle, the photographer
revealed the hidden beauty of some designs or the limitation of others. “Some
beautiful places proved boring from above, whereas some less attractive places,
such as industrial and infrastructural developments or even cemetery, were very
interesting and different from what I had expected,” he says.
For example, the picture “Six Feet
Under” captured rows of gravestones lined up in the cemetery with pockets of
green in between. “It reminds me of the Garden City movement in urban planning.
The residential planning for the living people is actually very similar to
cemetery layout when viewing from above, compared to another picture “Six Feet
Above” which captures the a big housing estate and the urban boundary in Hong
Kong suburb,” Cheng says.
Instead of shooting from a helicopter to
get a high angle panorama, Cheng favours the lower angle of a camera on a drone
to capture details of life within the city scape. “When you shoot too high in
the air it is easy to miss out the interesting details,” he remarks, adding
such details add to the overall composition of the work.
The architect picked up aerial photography
three years ago at a time from drone technology was less developed, partly to
help him out with his work. “At first, the camera could not shoot vertically
downwards and it imposed a lot of constraints in the composition. The
resolution was also not high enough for large scale output. But thanks to the
improvement of drone camera, the output size of drone photos are much bigger
these days which are sufficient for exhibition purpose. The introduction of
gimbal has also improved the stability of footages and it is much easier to
produce professional video and images nowadays with a drone,” he says.
Early on the photographer was
essentially interested in architecture photography, but he’s now seeking to
find the same elements of order and rhythm in natural landscapes. “The Coastal
Geometries series of fishing village, rice terraces, tea farm, mountains and
canyons I shot in China are all capturing the unintentional landscape in an
architectural approach,” he says.
Cheng believes a good picture should
have three key elements: “First it has to surprise you, whether it is a new
angle, new lighting or new subject etc., something that brings in new ideas
that you did not expect. Then, it should inspire you and make you think beyond what
you see. In other words it should be intellectually thought-provoking. And most
of all, it should touch your heart and help connect the artist with the
audience. And that is exactly where art comes in.”
Photographer Todd Kennedy: Chasing the Vertical Perspective
As a fixed wing acrobatics pilot for
over 20 years, Todd Kennedy is used to a bird’s eye view. Yet, even after clocking
hundreds of flying hours, he admits that it rarely gives him the opportunity to
really look at the ground below, hence his interest in drones.
“The ‘Top Down,’ and I mean really 100%
straight down perspective that drones offer is really fascinating, and I feel
it's still under explored. These days with cameras on smart phones everywhere,
the world has become so saturated with photos it's nice to see something fresh
and new,” the Australian photographer remarks.
Chasing that vertical perspective is
still very much a hobby for the award-winning photographer who turned seriously
to photography only four years ago at about the same time commercial drones
started to appear. “I bought a Canon 5Dmk2 DSLR, and shortly after that my
wife bought me a Parrot BeBop drone,” he recalls.
Kennedy is particularly interested in
revealing the way a landscape transforms even from a modest height revealing
patterns and textures that are not apparent from the ground. Using drone
photography, Top Down shots of a forest can reveal unexpected geometric pattern
and strong lines while a lake can become an abstract painting.
“Drone use is actually quite easy, the
real challenge is getting an interesting subject to shoot, and hopefully one
that no one else has already done,” Kennedy says.
With a full time job as a fund manager,
Kennedy doesn’t have much time to devote to photography, forcing him to plan
his shoots and visualize his images well ahead. “I check weather, tide, time of
day (which is particularly important for shadows), and scout for locations
using tools like Google maps. I use a small group of pre-set manual camera
setting to keep the image quality high. Because I'm mainly shooting landscapes,
the settings don't vary much so I don’t need to take that many shots of fly for
too long,” he explains.
But his award winning shot of a camel
caravan casting its early-evening shadow across the sands of Broome’s Cable
Beach in Western Australia demonstrates what a well-planned shoot can achieve.
“I had met the camel tour operator to
organize the shoot ahead of time. We drove up the beach in our 4WD to get far
enough from the Broome airport to allow the drone flight and get away from
crowds. From the ground looking towards the camels and into the sun the sky
looked quite orange. We sat and waited for the caravan to come our way. When it
arrived, I flew the drone out to the ocean side a bit so that I avoided being
directly above the caravan and also pointed the lens slightly away from the
sun. I only shot about six frames and in retrospect, I wish I took more. The
entire flight was only five minutes or so.”
With the sun in his face, Kennedy really
didn't know how good the images were until he saw them on his computer.
For his latest series, “Lit from above,”
Kennedy is exploring the versatility of drones using them to “light paint”
landscapes in the Australian desert. Having attached LED lights on a drone he
shoots long exposures from a DSLR on the ground. The first image taken with
this method has already won him the 2017 HeadOn Landscape Prize, a
large Australian photo competition.
“My aim with this series is to create a more surreal, alien looking landscape by selectively lighting certain features, and allowing the rest of the scene to fade to black. I aim to achieve this with aerial lighting rather than Photoshop skills so that the subject, while looking unearthly, is simply a new way of looking at a real, physical place. I would consider these images successful if they create a feeling of mystery and intrigue.”
AS FIRST WRITTEN FOR CHRISTIE'S INTERNATIONAL REAL ESTATE MAGAZINE, JAN-MAR 2018