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With the downturn in the economy, many professions are drastically hurting. Some professions are suffering more than others. Mine is no exception. I'm a pilot for a feeder cargo company. We fly a lot of freight for some of the bigger named freight handlers of the world. Even though boxes still need to get shipped, there has been a noticeable slow down in the cargo side of aviation as well. This results in cutbacks in the larger freight companies which directly affects the smaller freight companies that bring the boxes to smaller outstations throughout the United States.

The company I work for also has a charter operation that primarily deals with flying on-demand trips for the auto industry. For example, the major auto manufacturers run an assembly line to build the cars. If the company unexpectedly runs short on door panels for car type X, they need more panels to keep the assembly line going. As it turns out, it's cheaper to charter a turbine aircraft than to have it trucked up. Often, the cost of the charter is worth the higher price because it cost A LOT of money to shut down an assembly line for a day. Having that truck bring the parts to them shuts the assembly line down for a longer period of time. That's where we come in. My company would have crews waiting to leave at a moments notice to pick up the parts from a supplier and haul them to the manufacturing plants. Needless to say, we haul a lot of parts and equipment into and out of the Detroit area. With the auto industry in shambles, this has directly affected all the companies delivering parts. Where does that leave me? Well, not jobless — at least not yet. At the moment, since the charter operation is stagnant, they have me sitting standby or reserve for when other employees get sick. I then hop on an airline and fill in for the larger freight feeder routes.

With all this extra time, I decided to pick up photography as a side hobby. I found that I had a lot of free time in hotel rooms. This isn't always great for taking photos, but it is great for reading and learning techniques. It is also good for editing. I have plenty of time to mess around with Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended, and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. These two programs are very powerful, and account for 95% for my editing needs. I'd say the other 5% is Noise Ninja. Noise Ninja is a great program and Photoshop plug-in for reducing noise from high ISO in your photographs.

I started with photography a year ago this June. I can't even begin to describe how much information I've crammed into my head in such a short period of time. The trip that got me started actually was a fill-in type situation out in Fresno, California. My company air-lined me to Fresno and had me stay for a full 2 weeks. We fly during the evenings and night. If you think about it, freight is delivered to your door during the day, so the majority of air travel and sorting of the freight occurs at night. This left me a good deal of time to check out the surrounding area, so I headed to Sequoia National Forest to see the Redwood trees. After a whole day of shooting photos with my camera phone, I returned to the hotel and downloaded the photos to my computer. They came out looking quite horrible. On an impulse I went out and bought a Sony Alpha DSLR-A200 at Best Buy the very next day. I'm glad I had that to work with when I visited San Francisco the following weekend. I returned home, and on my weeks off, I decided to attend a free photography club.

Much of the time, while I'm flying, there really isn't anything interesting to photograph. When there is something interesting, I often find that I have more important things to do other than shoot pictures — like fly the plane! However, I do get a chance to shoot a few aerial shots from time to time. Below is a shot of the Hudson River Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, which is just a few minutes from the OCC (Orange County Choppers, from the television series American Chopper) showroom. We were flying North from the D.C. area en-route to Providence, RI to drop off a load of video games that originated in Georgia. This was cool for me to see from the air, because just a week or so earlier, I'd taken a short vacation in the neighboring Catskill Mountains to photograph the fall foliage. On the way back I got a chance to drive across this bridge and stop in the OCC showroom.

Here we are almost a year later. I'm now shooting Canon (and will be for good). I'm also now running a photography business in my spare time. The economy among other things is hindering how fast my business takes off, but I'm seeing steady progression, and am really pleased with what I've accomplished in a years time. I've also started a blog entitled From the Ground Up! where I teach photography techniques with each blog post. The blog started with the basics, and I am slowly working towards more advanced topics. If you have an interest in learning photography, I encourage you to stop in and visit my blog.