There are some genres of photography that I’ve never really felt drawn to. One of those was aviation photography. It used to strike me as a type of photography that was incidental to the hobby. So if you are an aerospace enthusiast, you take photographs of jets and planes but really as a record of what you saw at, say, an airshow.

It used to strike me as a bit like train spotting or stamp collecting. But I’m always open to try my hand at photographing new things, so when a friend suggested we go to an airshow, I decided to give it a try. The airshow was RAF Cosford 2024.

Photographing planes in flight poses some interesting technical challenges. You want fast moving planes to be sharp. But you also want to suggest movement — otherwise the plane looks static, as if it is just hanging from an invisible string. With jets, you can achieve this by panning — this blurs the background but keeps the plane sharp. With prop planes you can achieve this by ensuring your shutter speed is slow enough to blur the propellor movement. In either case, you need to have good technique. Exposure is also a challenge, since your camera wants to expose for the brighter sky rather than the plane itself.

Once you’ve overcome the technical challenges, here’s the kind of image you end up with (for enthusiasts, the jet is a Dassault Mirage 2000D). It’s sharp, properly exposed and the afterburner helps contribute to a sense of motion in the jet. But is it much more than a record shot?

Although I was pleased with my images at a technical level, for me they lacked that all-important ingredient of a good photograph: emotion.

Flying in these jets must be an amazing experience. The pilots are both incredibly talented and incredibly brave. But I didn’t get that feeling from my airshow images. They lacked… romance.

That got me thinking… If I could photograph these aircraft in any location, where would I choose?

I looked through some of my more mountainous landscape photographs and found some suitable backgrounds. Then I composited my photographs of jets and planes onto these backgrounds.

These images literally provide a different perspective. Although I took the photographs looking up from the ground, when composited into these different landscapes it's as if you are up in the air too, photographing from another plane.

Extracting the planes was mostly straightforward as they generally have clean lines. But I did need to spend time colour matching to make the composite look authentic.

For me, these images capture a little more of the romance of flight.