TOPGUN

Well, that's how I started in this business. I thought I'd tell you more about what it's like to pull max Gs, scream through the sky at Mach 1 and pull off an entire series of photo shoots, while sitting on my bottom for hours at a time.

During my first few flights in the US Air Force and US Navy jets, I developed my aerial photography skills from ground zero. I hadn't photographed before, so I was reinventing the wheel many times over, taking beautiful and some not-so-beautiful shots of those majestic machines, often publishing the good shots in books, magazines and newspapers. I found I had an eye for it, and moreover, I loved the work!

All of my efforts really paid off in 1991, when I signed a contract to photograph and write my own book, featuring TOPGUN. It took one and a half years of planning, dozens of letters, phone calls, meetings, and test shoots. Then, almost two years since I'd first flown at TOPGUN in the F-16N, I climbed aboard a TOPGUN legend, the A-4 Skyhawk, pulled on thirty years of aviation history, and leaped off the right runway at Miramar Naval Air Station into a cool, California afternoon. My driver, Navy Lieutenant Bill "Hack" McMasters flew us over some of southern California's most breathtaking vistas, while I reacquainted myself with my cameras and, in general, how to shoot from the back seat of a very fast-moving platform that pitched and rolled and climbed and tumbled, often under six-plus Gs.

The added stressors fueled my enthusiasm and excitement and I quickly adapted to the aerial stage once again. While "Hack" zorched up a rocky valley upside down, I practiced handling each camera, shooting out the left and right side of the scratched, plexiglas canopy.

"Hack" climbed for high altitude to gain energy, then whipped the stick sideways, and then back hard. We pulled five Gs as we dived toward the satin Pacific, 15,000 feet below. Our bodies suddenly weighed five times greater. My camera, a comfortable, familiar ten pounds on land metamorphosed into fifty pounds of bobcat, claws erect. The film canister I was loading into the hefty, hungry camera weighed more than a McDonald's quarter-pound cheeseburger.

By the end of that flight, I'd relearned all the tricks I had invented over the past few years. And I'd set the stage for some spectacular aerial photography. Getting good shots was relatively easy, although the shooting schedule was physically exhausting. Flying twice a day, and then spending many hours editing the previous day's slides, all I wanted to do afterward was fall into a deep sleep.

The ground shots were actually more challenging, mainly because of logistics -- just finding people to shoot, getting the aircraft moved to the right locations, etc. Planning a jet-fighter photography shoot takes a few brain cells. I sat down months in advance of my flying in the A-4, F-14, F-16, and the C-2, and typed a detailed, fifteen-page "wish list" of possible aerial and ground photographs. Then, I decided which ones to shoot first, and when and where to photograph them. Obviously, I listed many more than I could possibly shoot. And, sometimes the ones I later shot seemed redundant and a bit too similar to previous images, even if the background was different. But the limitations of the project did not daunt me in any way; instead they prompted me to think harder and more creatively.