I’d studied the flight path and watched how the light moved across the landscape at that exact time of day. I walked the route and tried to imagine the shot. Everyone I spoke to said it was impossible, you can’t shoot an air to air to ground photo on a long lens, you need to shoot on a wide lens near the plane. The camera was too slow, less than 3 frames per second, so I’d have to time it precisely rather than shoot a ‘burst’. The resolution was too low for major cropping, so it needed to be framed in-camera. Concorde is brilliant white and the ground much darker which meant the exposure was tough, with little in the way of dynamic range and no test shots. Plus getting an accurate focus on Concorde and tracking it at full speed whilst timing everything was going to be… challenging.
On the day itself, everything that could go wrong did. Traffic. Weather. Second-guessing my chosen lens. But the main issue was arriving at the helicopter to find a TV cameraman already in the window seat. Sitting on the other side wasn’t an option - only one side would have the view of the bridge. The helicopter pilot thought for a moment, then casually said 7 words that would stay with me forever: ‘You can just stand on the skid’. So that’s what I did.
Now I have 1000 thoughts running through my head, all of them bad. I’m standing on the outside of a helicopter heading to 3000ft, questioning everything. Then it got cold, really cold. I’d prepared for travel in a helicopter, not the intense icy winds you get standing inches below a massive rotor blade in the open sky at altitude. It was -10C in the air with massive windchill on top. I immediately couldn’t feel my fingers or face, the only way I knew I’d pressed the shutter is if the viewfinder blacked out for a split second as the mirror moved.
Then came a radio call from the pilot - ‘we can’t hover’. It sounded bad, and in many ways it was, the air was too turbulent to hover at that height so we had to fly circuits, circles in the air but with the helicopter always facing the same direction so the bridge was in view. Which meant we’d fly forwards, then sideways, then backwards, then to the other side all whist gaining and losing copious amounts of altitude in the bumps.
I made a conscious decision at this point to think of it as a stunt - this was the closest I’d ever get to hanging off the skid of a helicopter and I was doing it at 3000ft as an airliner passed underneath. My neck hurt from my heart beat. Then Concorde came into view. The immortal words the picture editor said as I left the office came back to me, “Don’t fuck it up.”
The rest is history.
CREDIT: Lewis Whyld
