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 am shooting in Michigan this week. Nothing like the perfect severe-clear midwestern summer day to take the skies. Clean air, perfect temps and low humidity.

Flew with a the good guys at McMahon in Canton. They flew me last summer for the Motor City Casino video and aerial shoot.

Shot quite a few projects for my client – starting out at Metro airport to Downtown Detroit to Port Huron and across the border into Sarnia, Ontario.

(landing at Canton)

(Downtown Detroit and Windsor, Ontario in the distance)

(The entrance to the abandoned and quite grand Detroit train station)

(Final stages of a building tear down near Grand Avenue)
Now I am off to Lansing and Grand Rapids for ground level shoots and then up to the U.P. for a day.

Sun and rain over downtown Las Vegas.

On the North Las Vegas tarmac.

After the storm passed.

Putting the ship away. (Shot with my lovely 28mm f/2.0 manual focus Nikkor on the D3s. This is a fantastic lens – almost as good as the amazing 28 f/1.4.)

I am shooting in Las Vegas and halfway through the flight this afternoon a set of thunderstorms developed along our flight path and we decided to set down and wait out the weather.

The first two frames were shot from the tarmac of the Henderson, Nevada airport. The next two are from the flight back to the North Las Vegas airfield and the last frame is the of the hangars at sunset.

Vanity Fair – July Issue: Betting the farm. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/07/white-family-farms-201107

John Huba shot the portraits for the story and I shot the aerials. To see the complete piece you’ll need to pick up a copy of the July issue. I shot aerials of this amazing potato farm surrounded by mansions along the Atlantic Ocean shoreline in the Hamptons.

This is the third aerial shoot I’ve shot for Vanity Fair in the Hamptons. They have also sent me to upstate Connecticut, twice to California and an amazing story in Texas and Arizona that did not run. The picture editors there are a great group of people and I have enjoyed every assignment.