A few months ago, I got a call from Stanford Magazine, the alumni publication of yes, that university in California. In typical photo editor fashion, the voice on the other end asked if I was "available for a shoot tomorrow" and of course, on a limited budget.
Normally, I would just politely hang up the phone at this point but realizing this could be the closest I might ever get to a fine educational institution like Stanford, I had to at least find out what they needed.
Apparently, two of the engineers behind the "on-demand" jet charter company DayJet were going to be at Boca Raton airport for just a few hours and the publication needed a quick portrait for an upcoming profile on these guys. They did a Google search for photographers closest to the airport and since I live about 3 minutes away, I guess I won the contest.
I immediately thought of that great portrait of actor Morgan Freeman standing on the wing of his jet. Another image that popped into my head was Sir Richard Branson in the Samsonite ad. Aviation is filled with interesting visuals, if only we had time to set something up.
The best we could do was open the hangar at dusk and position a few aircraft for the shot. (Luckily, DayJet's rocket of choice is the very light Eclipse 500 which the average photographer can lift and maneuver for good prop placement.)
By the next day, I electronically transfered the high-res file to California and they went to press. The online article can be found here. As a side note to photo geeks: See how the website's version of the image has dropped the color profile versus the sRGB-tagged example above. I guess Stanford could use a lesson in digital!
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