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Published Work
Here is some of my photography and writing that has been published.
(Note: Some of it is not available online yet. The ones not yet available are underlined and in red. Please be sure that I am working on getting that material up, and check back shortly if you are interested in seeing it once it becomes available here).
• MAGAZINES & NEWSPAPERS
In Flight USA was the first real publication to take my work, and the first time I was ever paid for aviation photojournalism. They published many of my airshow reviews through 2007 and 2008, including my coverage of San Francisco Fleet Week that got me my first cover. Being about aviation in general, not just airshows, In Flight also published some of my articles: My favorites were this one about Red Bull Air Racing (I wrote about it when the event came to San Diego in 2007) and this one about next-generation helicopters.
World Airshow News is where I currently send my work. They have published TONS of my airshow reviews (from Yuma 2008 to Paine Field 2010), as well as the occasional article such as this one about Paul Allen's Flying Heritage Collection and this one about Red Bull Air Racing in Rio.
I've also made it into smaller publications. The Stanford Daily, Biodiesel Magazine, and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat have each featured a picture or two from me. The newsletters of the Sonoma County Airport and of Luxemburg's Spotters' Journal, have also included my pictures and writing.
• INTERNET
FenceCheck.com published this article about Jim Leroy shortly after his tragic death.
I once recorded a podcast for I Love Planes dot com.
Many major blogs and websites regularly feature my photography. For example, Flightblogger has repeatedly posted pictures I took (from public land!) of Boeing's Everett factory, regarding the 787 and 747-8. Cavok, one of Brazil's biggest aviation blogs (containing all the news you'll get from Flightblogger, The DEW Line, Aviation Week, etc, plus lots of Latin American aviation news), also likes to use my pictures, sometimes as "photo of the week" (e.g. F-15, F-22, Grumman Cats) and sometimes to illustrate a story (e.g. Rafale, B-2). I Love Planes dot com, the KPAE blog, and Aviation Week's website, have each featured my photos on occasion.
I am basically the "unofficial official photographer" of the Pacific Coast Air Museum's annual Wings Over Wine Country airshow (I've been photographing it every year [except one] since 2002), so their website is plastered with my pictures, and I think they still have the text of some of my old airshow reviews.
Some airshow performers have my photography on their websites and promotional material, such as Jacquie Warda, Team Rocket, Rich Perkins, Bill Braack, etc.
I've also sent in written contributions to Boing Boing, Slash Dot, MWilliams.info, God Vs No God, and other websites. My work has been quoted on papers and websites about aviation history, security theater, stealth aircraft design, and theology.
• BOOKS
Luftwaffe: Confidencial includes a couple of my pictures, which illustrate aeronautical design features such as the swept wing and the flying wing.
I am currently working on a book about religion called The Atheist Spy.
• TELEVISION
I was briefly interviewed when Fantastico (Brazil's biggest weekly news show, roughly equivalent to 60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline, etc) covered Dayton's 2007 airshow. Watch the video here.
When Sean Derosier had a fatal accident while practicing for Miramar's 2004 airshow, NBC San Diego used some of my pictures of him (taken at Sonoma a few weeks before) in their coverage.
• ACADEMIC
My research paper about the role of narrative in videogames was published by the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal.
I spent two summers at Stanford doing aerodynamics research. Both projects aimed to use creative techniques to delay flow separation, thus reducing the drag of bluff bodies and increasing the lift of stalled airfoils. The first project did this with plasma ionization at the surface, the other using base bleed. (Until I get these links up, you can check out this paper, which is pretty much the same thing but done by other people).
• BOEING
Through internal company blogs, newsletters, etc, I have published quite a bit of writing internally to the Boeing community. Some of my favorite pieces are the following (although I had to scrub them clean of any Boeing proprietary information, so they're lacking some specific information and links to relevant internal Boeing documents): Flying Gets Safer And Safer, Rounding Up The Narrowbody Competition, Millenials And Knowledge Management, and The Fortune 500 Versus The Facebook Generation. My writing at Boeing is mostly about either Web 2.0 related topics (especially how young people need this kind of technology to learn, communicate, and collaborate) or aviation history (the neat stories and amazing impact of some of the most remarkable products, like the DC-3 and X-15, that were made by Boeing or by the companies it has bought)
• UNPUBLISHED
Here are some things I have written that have not been published anywhere, but that I wanted to take this opportunity to share with the world anyways.
An article about why condensation forms around airplanes at airshows. Most of that content can be found at AirplaneDesign.info.
An article about the history and interesting projects at Edwards AFB and the NASA Dryden flight research center.
And... A quick photo recap of some of my "adventures" in aviation photography. (Until I make this available on this page, here's a Facebook album with most of that content).
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As had been the case for the previous few years, the weather at the airshow was cloudy. But as the USAF jets started flying in the mid-afternoon, the clouds started to clear up. This is perfect weather for aviation photography, for two reasons. One; The mix of clouds and blue sky make for an interesting background, better than just the plain sky. And Two; The moisture from the recently-evaporated clouds made the air nice and humid, so any drop in air pressure around aircraft (such as over the wings while pulling Gs, inside the vortices that flow backwards from each wingtip, and all the way around the rear of a trans-sonic aircraft) could cool the local air below its dew point and condense that moisture into visible water droplets, or "vapor" as airshow fans call it. Vortices become visible as white streamer-like lines behind wingtips, cone-like clouds wrap themselves around trans-sonic aircraft, and puffy clouds cover the tops of wings and fuselages during tight turns and steep pull-ups.
You can click here to see a video of the F-22 demo that afternoon.
At one point, on the way down from the top of a loop (it happens 32 seconds into that video I just linked to, as well as at other times), the F-22 pilot Max Moga performed just such a steep pull-up, increasing the angle of attack and thus dropping the air pressure over the entire top-side of the airplane. This condensed the moisture over the airplane, making a small cloud form over the wings and fuselage as the airplane flew (and then quickly dissolve once the airplane was past). But this happened at a particular spot in the sky that allowed for a much more unusual effect. The airplane flew through the region where water droplets would be in just the right place to internally refract light from the sun at the angle that would send that light (split into a spectrum as always happens during refraction) towards the audience. In other words, the F-22 created a small localized rainbow. The effect was further enhanced by the very small radius of the water droplets, which caused irridescence: light refracted off the back interfered with light reflected off the front, and this interference was constructive or destructive to different colors of light depending on the size of the droplets and the angle of the light going through them, the net result being the swirl of colors similar to what you see in oil puddles, sea shells, and butterfly wings. It was really pretty amazing. I was snapping away with my 100-400 mounted on top of my 1D (and I think I had the 1.4x teleconverter on at the time, as well), so I got a picture of it.
The picture was actually quite boring and gray, initially. The clouds had not yet totally evaporated, and in order to be able to see details of the jet I over-exposed causing the background to look mostly white, and the rainbow colors to appear very faint. I posted the picture on Fencecheck that night, increasing the contrast and saturation a little in order to bring out the colors, but even then it was pretty pale. A little later I posted a new version where the contrast and saturation were increased a little more, but since I didn't want the airplane to appear as dark as a black silhouette, I didn't really increase the contrast and saturation a whole lot. A neat picture, but not really exceptional.
While compiling my best airshow pictures of 2008, I decided to try and really crank up the contrast and saturation on that picture, and to lower the exposure level in general, so as to bring out the rainbow colors as much as possible. It was worth having the airplane appear as a black silhouette, if it was surrounded by such an interesting pattern of bright colors. As you can see, the response was very positive.
About a year later, the picture was Image Of The Week at Cavok, Brazil's premiere blog covering the aerospace industry.
And a year after that - we're talking summer of 2010 now - my friend Allen Ball recommended that I submit the photo for the Museum of Flight's Spirit of Flight photo exhibit / competition. The photo took second place. Once it was published in the museum's magazine Aloft, someone saw it and posted the image from the museum's website onto Reddit, the news-aggregator-slash-social-network. The image made it all the way to the number two item on the site (it might have made it as high as the very top, I didn't watch continuously), and to the number one spot at /r/Pics. Particularly amusing were all the gays-in-the-military jokes ("This airplane runs on fabulous!", "This is what happens when you end Don't Ask Don't Tell"...) and all the references to the Double Rainbow video.
From there it got picked up by all kinds of places. Newspapers like The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail ran storie about it. Websites like Gizmodo and The DEW Line and ScienceBlogs and Truth Behind The Scenes featured it prominently. Cracked.com called it "the world's fruitiest picture of the world's most badass aircraft". Websites like Fark and FailBlog included it, Tumblr and FriendFeed had entries for it it, as did Awesome Aircraft, Neatorama, BuzzFeed, The High Definite the World Affairs Board, Pundit Kitchen, FreshBump, Cellar.org, JonathanBourke.com, AndrewNickles.info, EvilMadScientist, R2K, Regator, Perogrullo... A couple of websites in Pakistan even featured it, alongside images like this one and this one which I think are even better (and no, they're not mine. Don't I wish).
I definitely got my 15 minutes of fame out of that one!!!
Know of someplace I missed that featured my "famous" picture? Want to license it for commercial use? Let me know!
(As for non-commercial use, I have licensed it under a Creative-Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license. The original [straight out of the camera] is here, and the version used to make the Museum Of Flight print is here. You can download the high-res versions by selecting "Download" once you hover your mouse cursor over the image on each of those Photobucket pages).