The Art of Aerial Photography

Peter Eastway

Peter Eastway won the Aerial category of the 2023 Natural Landscape Photography Awards. A professional photographer for over 40 years, he won the Australian Professional Photographer of the Year twice, was chairman of the Australian Professional Photography Awards and has been publishing Better Photography magazine since 1995. His magazine is at www.betterphotographyeducation.com and the group of photographers mentioned in the article, ND5, can be found at www.nd5.com.au. www.nd5.com.au

petereastway.com

Abstract aerials have become a landscape genre in their own right. They are clearly recognisable, often with an intriguing puzzle to decipher or a detailed pattern to enjoy. And while we're used to seeing landscapes from around six feet above ground level, the view from 500 or 5000 feet above can be both novel and unexpected.

Now, point your camera down a little more to remove the horizon and your subject's context. Tighten up the crop on an interesting pattern or shape and, with some careful post-production, your aerial can be transformed into a commanding abstract.

Of course, how much abstraction is introduced is highly variable. Sometimes a subject like a sand dune takes on an abstract character, simply because of the aerial viewpoint. On other occasions, you can composite a number of images together to create something completely otherworldly.

Love them or not, the aerial abstract is incredibly popular and while it's quite askance to traditional landscapes, I find that the same attention to detail and technique is required.

Sand Dune, Lake Frome, 2022
Sand dune, Lake Frome, South Australia. The long, low lines of the sand dune sitting atop a salt lake takes on an abstract shape from 2000 feet above.

Insight

It's been interesting to watch the abstract aerial take its place in landscape photography over the past 10 years. The approach was firmly established well before drones became popular, affordable and reliable, so earlier work was shot just like the traditional aerial photographers, out of an aircraft window or door. But while in the past, almost any aerial was inherently interesting because of its altitude, the more recent abstract compositions, with their enhanced contrast and saturated colours, have taken the genre well outside the traditionalist's field.

Richard Woldendorp (1927-2023) was an aerial photography pioneer, working from the 1960s to just last year. In Australia, he sold hundreds of thousands of lavish coffee-table books full of amazing aerial photographs and while his work was considered semi-abstract at the time, today we would think most of his work very literal.

As one of my mentors, I invited Richard to a 2013 print exhibition which included some of my aerial abstracts. He was very polite as he took me aside in a fatherly fashion and congratulated me on my sense of framing and composition, but really, the colour was 'just too strong, too unrealistic'.
I smiled because I know aerial abstracts are not for everyone, but if you can accept that photography is a language which can be used for both fiction and non-fiction, for poetry and science, then nothing more need be said. Aerial abstracts are an artform first, a record of the landform below a distant second.

Shark Bay Exhibition, 2023
The visitor centre at Denham, Shark Bay still exhibits a truncated selection of prints from the Shark Bay Inscription – 2016 exhibition by the ND5 group of photographers.

The exhibition was titled Shark Bay Inscription – 2016 ( we were working ahead of the 400 year anniversary of the Dutch discovering Australia) and presented by ND5, a collective of four Australian photographers and a video producer. We had been shooting a series of projects around Western Australia since 2008, gradually developing separate tastes for increasingly abstract aerials.

Shark Bay as a destination is large, flat and desolate, but when you take to the skies, the environment below is a honey pot of colours, shapes and patterns. Importantly for us, the images were photographed with medium format digital backs and printed large, from one to two metres. The traditional approach to landscape detail remained fundamental, so that as our viewers came closer to inspect the print, they wouldn't be disappointed. However, unlike a traditional landscape, they would often struggle to resolve the abstract nature of the overall composition and it was only when they looked closer that the literal subject matter was revealed.

Using medium format back then certainly required extra effort, but everything is relative. I can remember lugging a huge 8x10" view camera and tripod up a steep sand dune last century, dreaming of the day technology would invent a small camera the size of a 35mm SLR camera, but able to capture the same 8x10" resolution and detail. Shooting with one of these old cameras out of an open window in a light plane was never going to happen, but when Phase One and Hasselblad introduced medium format cameras that could be taken out of the studio and into the field, the world of high resolution landscape photography was transformed. One need never again be disappointed in a print's technical quality, no matter how closely viewed.

Today with lots of mirrorless cameras using 50+ megapixel sensors and software like Topaz Gigapixel AI able to up-rez our files, medium format might not seem to be necessary, but for me, a medium format file is not just about resolution, but dynamic range and a different feeling of depth as well. However, that's a separate topic and a lot of my friends and students are producing stunning, jaw-dropping abstract aerials with mirrorless cameras. Pixel envy is not an issue.

Our Shark Bay exhibition has been incredibly successful, both financially and aesthetically. It seems the general public loves a good aerial abstract and our work is still displayed in the visitor centre at Denham. It seems the abstract nature of the subject matter allows more people to read something into the shapes and colours, making a personal connection for them even though they had never visited the locations. And as we know, selling landscape photography is as much about creating a connection with the buyer as producing a technically perfect print.

Useless Loop Salt Mine

The photographs from the exhibition also won us numerous awards in both print and book competitions, so much so that in Australia at least, there was a flurry of activity as photographers from as far away as the other side of the continent journeyed to Shark Bay. Locations like Useless Loop and Monkey Mia became almost household names within the local photographic community.