Cameron Davidson

Shot an night time aerial piece yesterday for a new campaign. Combination of stills and video shot with a Cineflex HD.

The Art Director and I directed Travis, the camera operator who came up with loads of strong ideas. It was a wonderful team effort. Nick, our pilot is super experienced with aerial video and stills. He setup some amazing passes for video that look just incredible.

NIck, Long Ranger Pilot, CineFlex HD on nose-mounted isolation plate, Travis, Camera Operator and Keith, Art Director.

Long Ranger on the deck after landing to show the client a quick tape of the shoot.

Downtown Detroit Moonrise with Windsor, Ontario in the background.

Art Director Keith in the left front seat of the Long Ranger after his first helicopter flight.

Landing Secured in Canton.

Two days in New York City on Thursday and Friday. Shooting for a new car campaign. Can not say much about the project, but it was a lot of fun to shoot.

Interesting set of challenges presented themselves. Flying in the Twinstar Thursday evening over Manhattan when LaGuardia ATC informs us that the airspace is closed. Of course this happened without the benefit of a NOTAM. The backstory is that the NYPD asked LaGuardia to “close” the airspace above midtown while the Russian Spies were being transported to the airport. We returned to Teterboro and planned for the next morning.

We took off from Teterboro after the morning fog burned off. As soon as we hit the Manhattan shoreline we ran into a problem. The governor in the Twinstar became erratic and one engine had to controlled by hand. The safety advantages of a twin engine ship were brought home quickly. Again we headed back to Teterboro. Safety first.

Flying with film professionals who know how to fly for the camera, plus are high-time pilots, is the only way to go. Flying with high-time pilots who understand how to identify and correct an inflight problem is essential to everyones safety and a successful mission. We could have continued to fly the mission but chose safety over finishing the shoot.

Plan B: A new ship was called in for the assignment. The TwinStar was flown back to its home base by two pilots and I completed my assignment in a brand spanking new Bell 407.

Flight Restricted Zone Here is a AOPA PDF worth reading.

Glorious day on Thursday! I shot a several projects within the Special flight restricted zone for a government agency. Loads of fun to be back above Arlington and Alexandria.

We took off in the Hughes 500 from Manassas Airport. The local airport authority was training fireman how to put out aircraft fires. The Commonwealth has a training aircraft that is used with a fire mat and a crash dummy to simulate a fire with Jet A and a victim on the ground.

Flying over the Columbia Island Marina on the east side of the Pentagon. The Washington DC border is the Virginia shoreline of the Potomac at low tide. For this image looking back toward Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park, we are, technically, flying over Washington, DC.

The Special Flight Restriction Zone requires Secret Service plus TSA waivers to enter. It is a somewhat difficult process to go through, however, I have shot within the FRZ and SFRZ many times. I miss being able to scoot into downtown DC and shoot with ease. I appreciate the simplicity of flying in other cities. Often we work out our schedules and approaches with the Air Traffic Controllers and off we go. That makes life simple.

DC is a special place with unique airspace restrictions that are required to protect the city.

The FRZ is the outer ring on the map. The inner ring of the AOPA map is the Special Flight Restriction Zone.

Paul is a very fine British photographer and a friend. Shoots mostly medium format architecture. This is a long term personal project that he self-published last year. Here is the link to the HD version of the video.

Yesterday was one of those knock-you-to-your-knees kinda of day. Started off o’dark early at 3 A.M. for a pre-brief with my pilot at 4:30 a.m. At 4:45 a.m. we launched into the cool and tranquil darkness of Central Iowa. Out first target was a wind farm in Northwestern Iowa. About halfway to the site, the winds started kicking up from the northwest. They were much stronger than all the aviation weather forecasts had predicted. Almost to the point where we were going to scrub the flight. The pilot and I decided to work with the wind and keep safety first. Which we did.

After battling a raising headwind for an hour and half, it was time to head to a nearby field and refuel. These World War II era hangars were manufactured by the Butler Corporation. The gentleman who ran the FBO said he had only seen this type of hangar at one other field, a small airport in South Dakota. This was the first of three fuel stops we made and none of the fields accepted credit cards for fuel. They gladly billed us.

After refueling, we headed north into Minnesota to shoot a second wind farm. That was a quick twenty-minute flight. In the interim, the winds rose even higher and a cloud deck settled in. My pilot and I agreed it was time to wait the wind out for a few hours. We landed at the Springfield, Minnesota field. A small single-runway airport manned by Sonny, a gregarious and kind-hearted eighty-two year old native of Springfield who gave us a lift to the local diner for lunch.

Sonny also arranged “transport” back to the field for us with the local law enforcement officer. I often meet the greatest people when I fly into small towns. The back of the squad car is a bit cramped and sparse, but then it is not really designed for comfort.

Eventually, the winds died down and the cloud deck started to break apart. We lifted off around four in the afternoon and headed for Northeastern Iowa to shoot a huge wind farm that spanned several miles. The light was amazing: crisp and clean plus the clouds created wonderful shadow play on the freshly planted fields. We shot until sunset and then headed back to Des Moines.

When we landed, the Hobbs meter read 9.1 hours. That is a long day! 17 hours from eyes open to eyes shut.

Two years ago, I spent quite a bit of time shooting aerials of the coastal marshes and islands of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana for Ducks Unlimited. This shoreline is amazing: there are vast unbroken stretches of pristine marsh intermixed with canals constructed for the oil industry tugs and barges. The BP blowout and loss of the Deepwater Horizon is going to significantly impact the Gulf Coast shoreline for years. The shoreline of Louisiana has receded in recent years due to siltation, development and mangrove destruction.

Aerial Louisiana Coastline Marshes – Images by Cameron Davidson

I’ve shot on quite a few deepwater rigs, primarily for a couple of clients who produce natural gas. The SPAR rigs are quite amazing – much like an iceberg, the majority of the vessel is underwater held to the seafloor by gigantic chains, such as this one I shot on another SPAR rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

For many years I have been drawn to the interaction of our imprint on the shorelines. I’ve shot marshes and rivers around the world and continue to shoot personal projects on watersheds. I am glad that I was able to shoot a few of the Louisiana marshes before they become impacted by this tragedy.

I hope you enjoy the views. These were shot from a Bell Jet Ranger and most of the flight was between one-hundred and three-hundred feet above the water.

Corbis created a gallery of my Arizona border fence construction images that I shot two years ago for an editorial project. The first gallery is a collection of images shot in late afternoon and the early evening near Naco, Arizona. The photographs range from the border fence under construction to paths through fields that cross the border and the three strands of barbed-wire that constitute the international boundary line.

A second set of images, all aerials of the Arizona border shot between Nogales and Naco will be uploaded by Monday.

This was a fun shoot for Preservation magazine. Jessie Despard the Art Director for Preservation asked me to shoot a story on The Wilderness Battlefield in Central Virginia and how it may be impacted by the construction of a new Wal-Mart less than a mile from the battlefield. Jessie came up with the idea of shooting the field with an SX-70 polaroid of a Wal-Mart in the frame.

The rainy day image of the Wal-Mart was shot by a Preservation staffer Beth Caudell Siegel and I created a Polaroid SX-70 frame for the image with a PhotoShop action. I defocused the image a bit and printed it on several paper stocks in order to find one that most closely resembled a real SX-70 polaroid. The goal was to find the perfect spot on the proposed building site that would look perfect as an out of focus background for a hand holding the polaroid. Art Director Jessie became the hand model for this late winter image. (There are quite a few PS actions for creating SX-70 frames – try this link to download a few of them)

The majority of the story were portraits of the folks interested in moving the Wal-Mart up Route 20 a mile or so, several stitched panoramic photographs of the battlefield and a the gravesite for Stonewall Jackson’s arm.

This one was kind of strange. Here it was, late February, just weeks after our double-blast of back-to-back twenty-plus inch blizzards and I am laying on the ground in the snow, my face buried into the mud, getting my Nikon as low and possible to the ground to look up at the headstone and to make sure no snow was showing in the background, plus an assistant was holding a Nikon SB to light the headstone so we could bring out the detail in the relief. It felt pretty absurd and was funny at the same time.

I shot all of the portraits with two new Nikon lenses I recently purchased. The wonderful and shockingly sharp 100mm f/2.8 VR and equally scary 45mm for tilt/shift work.
I rarely use the tilt function for these lenses but sure love being able to shift for stitches and for the occasional architectural shoot.

Aerial of Port au Prince that Wired ran in the current issue. From my aerial shoot over Port au Prince in late February. Wired looked at a set of my selects plus the images I placed with Corbis. They choose this image from the Corbis News Collection to run as the lead double truck in the Organizing Armageddon piece brilliantly shot by Q. Sakamaki. (Corbis #42-24605172)

Jay Maisel and his trusty studio managers/producers John and Jamie asked me to come up to New York to present my aerial work to his workshops students. I was honored. Jay was a huge influence on me as a young photographer and I respect him a great deal.

The workshop was filled with an interesting mixture of photographers. Three from Canada, one from Singapore and the remainder from the states. Three of the attendees were sporting Leica M9s and one is a well-known television actor who is a pretty nice guy who I found out knows a friend of mine.

Going to Jay’s former bank building in the Bowrey is always a joy. It is an incredible building full of his work and found objects.

Jay took us all out to an amazing meal in Chinatown with way too much food.