Runway Wrecker

We’re frequently asked how we pick the locations for certain shoots, or indeed how we find them. Often it’s a case of riding round in the car until you find something on the hoof, or simply relying on the depth of local knowledge. This was pretty much the story when we shot Adam Crouch’s unbelievably smart wrecker recently for next month’s Truck & Driver magazine. When asked if he could think of anywhere "big and open", Adam dutifully replied: "Yeah… a mate of mine owns an airfield runway… !" The ‘mate’ turned out to be none other than the sublimely charismatic Dave Walton, so this is how we ended up freezing our proverbials off on an extremely chilly winters evening at Bruningthorpe (where incidentally we also bumped into Mike Cooper and his Panda featured in the earlier post). Not only did we have the entire bottom section of the vast two mile long runway to play with, but Adam and his crew agreed to hang with us until that perfect 20 minute period between dusk and sunset.

As we’ve explained before in the previous iPhone App post, there’s two perfect photography windows in a 24-hour cycle: dawn and dusk. The main trick is to start guessing your exposures a bare minimum of 10 minutes prior to the time spot you're trying to hit. The first shot of this particular dusk series was shot at 19.04, with the main event taking place at 19.24. By 19.40 total darkness had fallen and the game was over. Roughly 30 minutes, 10 shots, and a reasonable range between dusk and sunset. Having studied the times on numerous occasions, we reckon you’re talking six or seven minutes of optimum light as the sun hit’s the deck. This is by no means a perfect shot: maybe a little less lighting and a bit more exposure?

The shots were lit with a simple set up of two generators both chucking out somewhere in the region of 800W, both connected to flash heads and standard dish reflectors. We’ve used a focal length of 80mm to compress the background slightly, but don’t forget this would be the equivalent of 50mm on a 35mm DSLR.