Los Angeles photographer Mike Kelley ended up in a helicopter by chance. When a friend offered him some airtime with a pilot, he thought he’d ride around in the sky for a while and snap a few pictures. A couple of hours and 1500 photos later, a thought occurred to him. Looking over his photos, Mike realized that the City of Angels looked different from the sky. Thus began a project that turned that couple of hours and thousands of photos into two years and 45,000 images, culminating in the release of LA Airspace, a photographic book depicting the life of Los Angeles, viewed from above.
Mike says he’s always been an aviation nerd, but he’d never had the chance to get into a helicopter until that day. “I was strapped into the seat of a Robinson R44 at Zamperini Field in Torrance, feeling something between absolute elation and and fear for my life,” Mike says about his first flight in his introduction to LA Airspace. He had never considered trying aerial photography until that point, but something about it instantly exhilarated him. He found an instictive shooting style in the air that was very different from his architecture photography, which tends to be much more cerebral and deliberate.
These images were spontaneous, raw, and 90% edited on the fly in Lightoom. It was almost more of a chance for me to do something like a splatter painting if you will—quick, off-the-cuff type images.
Mike found that LA in particular was outstanding for aerial photography. “The landscape is so incredibly varied,” he notes, “and the crazy amount of urban sprawl means there’s a hugely diverse set of subjects that you can work with.” Mike was finding mountain, desert, ocean, beach coastline, and cityscapes, in addition to industrial scenes like airports and ships, all within a short distance from LAX.
Planning the actual flights for the photos was itself, a huge task. Mike learned that LA’s airspace is one of the most congested in the world, and for each trip he had to work with the pilot, air traffic control, weather, and deal with temporary flight restrictions (TFRs), which in LA, are quite common.
If there’s a Dodgers game going on, there’s a flight restriction over the entire downtown area, or if Obama is in town—as he so often is!—the whole day is pretty much a no-go as far as general aviation is concerned.
Mike says it was crucial to have a pilot who was experienced flying in congested areas and who had a good rapport with air traffic control, and even then, there was still a lot that was beyond their control. On one attempt to get photos of LAX, Mike and his pilot took to the skies only to be immediately asked to turn around and fly home, as something had come up with air traffic controls. On top of that, they were always at the mercy of the weather as well as haze and marine layer, which is a foggy air mass that builds above large bodies of water.
You ideally want some clouds in the pictures, but if you have too many clouds or they block the sun, you’re just flying around burning money in the process. And at sunset, when I always tried to shoot to get the best light, waiting for the sun to transit past some clouds could be an amazingly long wait.
Mike knew from the start that his photos were building towards something, but it wasn’t until the midst of the project that he knew it was a book. After all the hours and days of planning flight schedules and editing photos, he says that the biggest challenge of the whole project became putting things together for the book. With a Kickstarter for funding, a pitch video for connections, and interviews for publicity, getting the book out there took more work than he would ever have predicted. Right now, Mike is in the process of creating an online store, which will have fine art prints and merchandise, as well as copies of LA Airspace for purchase.
Check out Mike’s pitch video for LA Airspace below:
Right now, you can find fine art prints of LA Airspace on purephoto.com, and you can contact Mike directly for book purchases here.
And to view more of Mike’s work, visit mpkelley.com!