Photographing aerially can be a wonderful experience and not difficult or prohibitively expensive. The resulting pictures from your shoot will blow you away, if you do them right. Got someplace you've been photographing for years? Ever wonder what it would look like when photographed from above? Read on.

In this article I will discuss photographing the landscape by making aerial photographs. Then I'll give a little background into my methodology and aesthetic  when flying over something at about 100 mph.

I began photographing in the southeastern corner of Washington, in an area called The Palouse, in the mid nineties. By the late nineties, I'd been a few times and was still shooting on the ground in 8  x10. I got it in my head that I wanted to try to shoot from a plane so I went to the small airport in Pullman, Washington and met a man who ran an air charter company. He agreed to take me up and told me that he had a plane with a 5 inch metal plate in the back floor that...