Landscape Photography Cornwall

Britain from the Sky - the aerial photographer and the N8

All of the pictures you see on this page were taken with a mobile phone; not bad considering it’s something that aerial photographer Jason Hawkes is used to doing with an SLR since he started over 20 years ago. Throughout March 2011 though, the 41-year old traded his Nikon D3X for something a tenth of the size for this latest round of bird’s eye shooting - the Nokia N8 and its 12-megapixel camera. “The first task was to come up with some locations that were really big. It’s ok to shoot from 1000ft with a 300mm lens on a big DSLR where you can zoom in on some really interesting abstract patterns but the N8 has a fixed, wide lens, so you can’t move in and out at all. Effectively, the helicopter becomes your zoom and the lowest you can legally go is around 800ft which is about the height of Canary Wharf.”

The first day, for example, saw the team take off from Denham airfield just to the west of London, head down to Portsmouth for the Spinnaker Tower and all the way along the south coast to the off shore lighthouse at Land’s End picking up places such as the Needles of the Isle of Wight, Chesil Beach and the china clay mines of St. Austell, Cornwall, along the way. All in all, it was a collection of 7-hour days, including stops to refuel. So, after five full sessions working with the N8, what did Hawkes make of the experience? “Well, I can’t say I would use one for aerial photography again but I was definitely impressed. When Nokia first asked me to do it, I thought the idea was ridiculous but on the way to the meeting I saw one of the N8’s 96-sheet billboard posters of a shot taken with one of the phones and I was blown away. I went over to Flickr, found the original final and downloaded it to check that no one had messed around with it and sure enough it was the real deal.” “One trouble was with the viewfinder. Because it’s a piece of glass, I felt like I spent a lot of time looking at a reflection of myself on the screen which made it tricky to shoot. It’s also only possible to take one picture per second. Normally, I’d be taking 10 or 20 shots in that time, so it was rather like going back to film in that respect.”

While the N8 might have been a step back for Hawkes, it was still a huge leap on from when he first started out snapping from altitude. With a degree in photography under his belt, Hawkes was becoming frustrated as an assistant not learning so much about how to take shots as the commercial side of the business. It was only when he and a friend picked up an outdoor pursuits magazine for ideas of something to do at the weekend that he chanced upon his niche. “On a whim we took a flight on a microlight. I didn’t have my camera with me but I knew straight away that I had to get back up there and take some shots with all those amazing patterns down there to catch. I gave up my job immediately, we went down to the bank and got a £20,000 loan to buy a microlight - you could do that back in the early 90s - my friend learnt to fly it and we just started shooting pictures.” What resulted was “London From the Air”, Hawkes’s first and most successful book to date, selling 190,000 copies. He quickly switched to a helicopter, given that it’s technically illegal to make money using a microlight, and has since made a name for himself as one of the top aerial photographers in the field, receiving e-mails every week from his peers asking him how he manages to capture his famous night shoot work.

Earth's Beauty Tours Cornwall Photo Workshop 2011 - DVattika ...

Just back from my yearly photographic workshop in Cornwall and everything went as well as expected. All participants were absolutely fantastic and the weather at its best. Apart from one day that rained, the rest of the week we had sunshine and superb temperatures.

I would like to thank all who participated for their good nature and exquisite humor. Lovely to meet the new members and hope to see you again in the future.

I am working on a slideshow as we speak so, keep an eye on this space.

www.earthsbeautytours.

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