ASMP DC asked me to fill-in for a speaker who was unable to present work this evening. I am presenting images from my new book along with a few behind the scenes picture and stories. If you are in DC tonight and have the time, please swing by the ASMP meeting in Adams-Morgan. Details are in the link. I will also have copies for sale and signing.
http://www.asmpdc.org/education/event/info?id=265
David Fahrenhold and I are being interviewed by Kojo Nnamdi tomorrow on his radio show at 12:00 Eastern CHESAPEAKE BOOK http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2011-10-06/chesapeake-above
Personal images shot with my Hassy H2 and Leaf 75 of the California desert after a morning spent chasing a very special train. Aircraft was an A-Star B2.
And playing around with a little B&W conversion
A couple of months ago, Susan Meiselas invited me to be a part of an exhibition in Beijing titled Coal and Ice. My contribution to the show is small and consists of three aerials of Mountain Top Removal in Southern West Virginia.
The project is produced by the Asia Society and the show features images from photographers in China, the USA, Canada, Malaysia, Russian, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom.
I am honored to be included in the show. If you are in Beijing or know of someone there, please let them know about the show.
http://www.popphoto.com/news/2011/09/post-office-reveals-stunning-aerial-photograph-stamps-2012
My friend Richard Hamilton Smith also contributed to this series along with Jim Wark, an aerial shooter based in the West along with a couple of other photographers plus satellite imagery.
I have one image in the project and it was shot for my Chesapeake project. I am looking forward to buying lots of these stamps.
A crazy soggy week week helped along by a last minute notice from the freight company that the ship carrying the Chesapeake book had docked in Philadelphia and that my copies would arrive in less than a day. Rain all week from the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee destroyed the schedule for several shoots, so everything was in flux. The original idea was to drop the pallets in my driveway and I would split the packages for delivery to a few books stores and an environmental group. The torrential rains put a stop to that idea. I had the books diverted to my nearby storage unit.
Of course, Murphy raised his ugly little head and the delivery truck broke down. The battery died and the lift would not function. The driver managed to get the truck started for a few minutes and we tossed the pallets of books onto the loading dock with the help of a pallet jack. 700 books does not look like much until you look at the pallets that are shrink-wrapped in plastic and belted with tin wraps.
The good thing is the orders are starting to come in – even though I won’t have the paypal page set up for another day. I’ve sold or delivered close to 200 copies so far. Grafik, the primary designer for the book took a delivery of signed copies and a major environmental group just purchased 116 copies.
Just found out that I was selected for the 200 Best Ad shooters new edition. Bizzaro double-page spread aerial from a shoot in Ethiopia for American Express publishing.
Next week the book “Chesapeake: The Aerial Photography of Cameron Davidson” will arrive. I expect three pallets of books in my driveway next Friday and another 2000 copies will be delivered to the University of Virginia Press in Charlottesville.
The past couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur – I was in Haiti for 11 days – first shooting in the north near Cape Haitian at a Catholic hospital and then in Jacmel shooting construction of a medical clinic. As soon as I made my way home, Hurricane Irene came for a visit and a client assigned me a challenging few days of shooting the dame from Hurricane Irene from the ground and the air. I spent four hours in a Jet Ranger dodging thunderstorms and tracking down crews that were restoring power near Richmond and the Middle Peninsula.
The AerialChesapeake.com is now live. At the moment there are quite a few advance quotes about the book and within the next coupel of days I’ll have an ordering page via Paypal an stories about the images and project.
For now, I’ll leave you with a quote from my friend Mark Derr. Mark is an incredible writer and we worked on an editorial project on working dogs plus the Over Florida book way back int he early nineties.
Combining his passion for flying, his abiding love for the Chesapeake Bay, and his compulsion to record what he sees–even if it means hanging out the window of a sharply banked single-engine plane–Cameron Davidson has created a magic carpet ride of a book. In these photographs, Davidson presents the Bay through all seasons, at all times of day–though he and his cameras love mornings and evenings best–as no one, I dare say, has done before or is likely to do again. The natural and built worlds that are so often locked in mortal combat stand not juxtaposed but interwoven in a way that shows the complexity and fragility of the Bay today. Whether tomorrow we will continue to use the Bay as a battleground in the war on nature or turn it into a model for a more sustainable and sane way of living on this planet is the primary question underlying this remarkable book.
Mark Derr
Miami Beach, Florida
I recently closed down my AerialStock.com site and uploaded quite a few aerials to Gallery Stock. They went live earlier this week. My friend Richard Hamilton Smith, the great landscape shooter from the North Woods of Minnesota introduced me to the good folks at GalleryStock.
Absolutely fantastic flight from Cape Haitian to Jacmel aboard a Missian Aviation Fellowship Cessna 207. These guys are fantastic pilots and mechanics. They fly a Kodiak plus several Cessna 200 series aircraft. I’ve flown with them quite a bit since 1999 and they always impress me. Our pilot today was a young Canadian who has 4000 flight hours – he has been in country for two and half years and he is building time at 1000 hours per year.
I have a B&W series from this flight that I will share within a day or so.