Burt Rutan, the renowned airplane and spaceship designer, recently retired from Scaled Composites. During his career he produced 367 individual concepts — and watched 45 of them fly. He began in 1968 with the VariViggen canard, and ended with his BiPod flying car. In between came the VariEze, Grizzly, Voyager, Catbird, Boomerang, Proteus, White Knight, and a pair of rocket-propelled spaceships. The strange names perfectly fit the strange designs, whose sinuous shapes often resembled sculpture more than flying machines.

When Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine decided to honor him with a special tribute in the January 2012 issue, photo editor Caroline Sheen asked me to produce the cover. Trish Mills at Scaled coordinated the BiPod rollout and rounded up a crew to support the shoot. Bruce Lockwood helped Dan Ryan truck the Santa Monica Museum of Flying’s VariViggen to the Scaled ramp at Mojave Air & Spaceport, where Justin Steinmetze gave it cosmetic retouches. Legendary test pilot/astronaut Mike Melvill brought in his Long-EZ, then replaced the Viggen’s tires faster than an Indy pit crew. Now we had Burt’s first airplane, his last airplane, and his most popular airplane.

Just before sunset I climbed onto an old scissors lift coaxed to life by Frank O’Sullivan, and began shooting. Then as dusk descended, first assistant Petra Rajnicova coordinated lighting the three aircraft with Norman 400B strobes. But when it got completely dark, it was time to reach for my favorite flashlight, a Pelican 7060. For 30 seconds I carefully painted the trio with just its beam, at f/16 and 200 ISO. Sunlight, strobelight, and flashlight: three different sources and three very different looks. And the editors’ final cover choice? The sunlit version. ‟Darkness,” one explained, ‟doesn’t sell covers.”

Dr. Frank Donnelly ("Dr. D") goes inverted in his clipped-wing 1946 Taylorcraft.

Like pilots, aviation photographers love technology. Any gadget that helps take unusual shots eventually lands in our camera bags. So when AOPA Pilot assigned me to photograph air show performer Dr. Frank Donnelly (“Dr. D’s Old-Time Aerobatics”) I grabbed a pair of PocketWizard transceivers on the way out. PW’s are palm-sized radios that can remotely trigger cameras from places photographers can’t (or shouldn’t) be. Out at his Cable Airport hangar I made some ground shots of Dr. D with his 1946 Taylorcraft, then asked if he would go fly some aerobatics while snapping self-portraits. He thought that was a swell idea. I attached a 15mm semi fisheye lens to a Canon 5D MkII, plugged in a PocketWizard switched to receiver mode, then clamped the rig to a brace inside his single-seat cockpit. With one hand on the stick and the other triggering a second PocketWizard, Dr. D took off to fly his show routine and take some pictures. He nailed them all, but my favorites were the ones he made while inverted. The photos ran in the October 2011 issue.

Gulfstream G450 photographed at KTUL (Tulsa International Airport)

Here’s the original horizontal. You can click on the cover to see how the production geniuses at Executive Controller turned it into an elegant vertical. Thanks to the music system in my little Acura, it was a fun drive from our Los Angeles base. I loaded an iPod with “This American Life” episodes I missed, and my teenage kids burned a DVD mashup so I could sample their favorite music, by weirdly named bands like Vampire Weekend, The Wombats, Ratatat, and Black North Super Rainbow. If we bumped into each other at the convention, and I seemed a little deaf, please blame it on my kids.

I recently spent a long dark-to-dark day photographing TWC’s snazzy new Van Nuys Airport digs. I shot tethered to a MacBook for the first time, thanks to my wizard assistant Petra Rajnicova. This was our last and most complex shot. TWC wanted us to portray its Gulfstream G550 like it’s about to launch in that soft blue pre-dawn light. We actually started shooting just past sunset, figuring the fading dusk sky would at some point match the intensity of the hangar lights. But I had underestimated how bright they would get. By the time the sky was a beautiful deep blue, the hangar was over 100x brighter. Fortunately, this wasn’t film. Digital lets us use post-production techniques to blend parts of one image with parts of another. So leaving the aperture constant, I varied the shutter speeds for the next half hour. Petra helped by flashing a portable strobe here and there, painting parts of the jet with a flashlight, and having the pilot self-light with an LED LitePanel. The next day I burrowed into my Mac-lined hobbit hole to cut and paste the pixels. Here are a few of the nine frames that went into the final composite:

ABOVE: The base photo, with the G550 lit by the dawn-like reflected blue sky.

ABOVE: This frame provided the pilot, lit by a LitePanel LED.

ABOVE: I used these cabin lights, cloning a warm glow onto the forward window.

ABOVE: The jet's too bright, the sky's too dark--but the engine inlet is perfect.

ABOVE: Corrected for color and exposure, this frame gave me the right hangar interior.

ABOVE: The final shot again, with graduated filters applied to darken the ramp and the sky.

The earliest camera pod belonged to shooting legend George Hall. He chopped the tail off a bomb pod, stuck a rear-facing camera inside, hung it on a weapons station, and took off for some seriously tight formation flying. Three decades later, Erik Hildebrandt’s innovative Mach Pod brought the concept into the digital age, yielding a series of stunning images for a variety of aviation clients. The Back/Up Pod builds on their pioneering work, but adds hard wiring for 100% reliability, single-joystick control for easy operation, and laptop integration that fully exploits camera capabilities.

This shakedown flight turned out to be a rigorous test of the pod’s capabilities. It was configured with a Canon 5D Mark II, and a 24~105 lens that zoomed through its entire range via an ingenious motorized ring. The target aircraft were two Embraer private jets—a Phenom 100 and a Legacy 650. With aerial director Kevin LaRosa and pilot Ace Beall in the cockpit, and Doug Holgate filming through the Vectorvision periscope, we simultaneously made video and stills. Three hops and six airborne hours later, I had over 1500 photos to choose from. A few of them are attached.

Embraer Phenom 100 photographed with Back/Up Pod on July 16, 2011

Embraer Legacy 650 photographed with Back/Up Pod on July 16, 2011.

Embraer Legacy 650 photographed with Back/Up Pod.

This shoot, of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, was a long time coming.

First announced as the 7E7 in 2003, the initial concept sported a sleek dropped nose, rakish cockpit windows, and a dramatically curved shark-fin tail. Boeing commissioned models of it from PacMin; this one landed on my doorstep one lucky morning.

But as the design matured, the aircraft evolved into a more conventional design, distinguished by graceful upswept wingtips and noise-reducing serrated engine nacelles. It first flew on July 8, 2007 (7-8-7); launch customer ANA (All Nippon Airways) will take delivery of its first Dreamliner sometime this fall.

Last week, ANA tapped Clay Lacy and the Astrovision team to make the first air-to-air imagery of their new jet. We flew Clay’s modified Learjet from Van Nuys north to Boeing Field in Seattle. After refueling, we joined up with the 787 over the Olympic Peninsula for what turned into a two hour photo flight. I took almost 900 stills through the windows (with a Canon 1Ds Mark III) and the bottom periscope (with a modified Canon 7D). Between the Lear and the Dreamliner, we were burning through money at the rate of about $190 a minute. That, and the realization that I was directing a $160 million dollar plane, was a powerful incentive to work quickly and efficiently.

Here’s my favorite image, made through the tube. And yes, we do fly that close.

Sully arrived in a Citation Mustang, then looked around the ramp. He spied a rare Cirrus VK-30 prototype sitting in the corner and darted over. Owner Tom Hastings took note, and invited him to go flying. Sully took the left seat, Tom the right, and I scrambled into the back blathering that someone really needed to take pictures of this. Sure, Sully hadn’t flown since October, had never even been in a VK-30, and knew nothing about Tom (great guy) or the plane’s maintenance history (impeccable). But I figured the flight would be safe, smooth, and as uneventful as flying in a … well, in an airliner. What I forgot is that Sully drove F-4 fighter jets in the Air Force. He commanded Blue Force missions during Red Flag exercises, and served on accident investigation boards his whole life. This guy knows exactly how to find the edge of the envelope. So for the next 70 minutes, we did 70-degree 2G turns, steep climbs, rapid pullups, speed brake deployment, aileron turns and chandelles so perfect, you’d swear he had 500 hours in the plane. “Anybody for a little zero G?” he’d say, and immediately my camera turned weightless. Back on the ground, he posed patiently for endless photo requests by fans while signing Highest Duty, his best-selling book. I was the last one in the line. He scratched a quick “Sully” across the title page, thought a moment, and then added, “Thanks for flying with me today.” Thank you, Captain.

Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger flying Tom Hastings's Cirrus VK-30

Tom Hastings's Cirrus VK-30, hangared at KVNY.

EAA member Kendra Tally, dressed in period attire, watched the sun set from EAA's B-17G, Aluminum Overcast.

Business aircraft brokers are very particular when commissioning photographs. They like to see their planes lit brightly, popping out from what is nearly always a cluttered airport background. Some brokers prefer a hint of background detail, lending some depth to the photo; others want the airport to go completely dark. And a few, of course, need both approaches. Fortunately, it’s possible to do them all on the same shoot. Here’s one of my favorite business aircraft, the Piaggio P180 Avanti, photographed recently in Carlsbad, CA. Varying the ratio of strobe to ambient light gave total control over the airport’s appearance. Add a little retouching, some selective use of gradient filters, a few color adjustments—and we have something for everyone.

Kind of like this website. It launched as Aeropix in 2001 and now lands with a new name. You’ll see a strong emphasis on business jet photography, along with imagery for aviation and aerospace industries. There’s lots of magazine work, too. One tab introduces my collection of vintage X-plane aircraft models.

And there’s this blog. Like Xaero, it begins here and it will land here, but during its flight will explore a variety of aviation, space, and photography subjects.

Expect some photo-techno-wonko stuff in the mix. This image of Xaero was made for an Air & Space/Smithsonian story examining the rocket propulsion community spread across California’s Mojave Desert. One portable Norman strobe lights it from the right. A Canon speedlight lit up the inside and a Nikon strobe provided the glow beneath the rocket. But the big Aha! moment was slapping on a polarizing filter—its first time out of the case in ten years, a desperate attempt to pop the rocket out of the background. Fortunately, it worked. (Someone please explain how the uncommanded brain reaches so deep into the subconscious to find solutions.)

And Masten’s next project name? Get ready for…Xogdor!