Air2Air with Richard Mallory Allnutt
There are good aviation photographers and there are great aviation photographers. At Vintage Wings of Canada we’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the best - Eric Dumigan, John McQuarrie, Seth Goltzer, Peter Handley and Richard Allnutt to name a few. In the months ahead we will be profiling all of them on our website. There are many who think that all it takes is a seat on a B-25 and a behemoth camera to guarantee great images. This may guarantee good images, but not great ones.
It takes the talent and creative spirit of someone like Richard Allnutt combined with a passion for the flying machine and its place in history to produce the great images - images that evoke emotions, make us linger on the details and put us there in the “delerious burning blue” as a Grumman Wildcat thunders past - on its way to some reckless fight over the Pacific. By virtue of his British birth, Allnutt was imbued with genetic passion for vintage aircraft and in particular fighting warbirds. A professional shooter now living in the Washington DC area, Allnutt chases the ultimate-air-to air shot like a hunter stalks big game - with persistance and patience.
Here are just a few of his amazing photographs and his notes about the time and place they were taken.
Lead Photo: I had a pretty exciting experience at the MAPS air show in Akron, Ohio in 2005. We got up with five other warbirds: a Wildcat, Dauntless, Kate replica, Zero replica and a PBY Catalina. The weather was really murky, so we climbed all the way to 3,500 meters to do the shoot. It was bloody cold in the back of "Panchito"! The wind really rushes through when the waist hatch, and the tail turret are removed from the aircraft. But what a view! Steve Craig brought his beautiful F4F-3 Wildcat in for some stunning photographic opportunities. This aircraft is the only airworthy, non-folding wing Wildcat. It is one of the few aircraft raised from Lake Michigan to make it into private hands.
Joining us for the trip out to Thunder Over Michigan last year were the father-son team of Bob and Chris Baranaskas flying a P-40 Kittyhawk and P-51 Mustang. Here Chris brings his father's Mustang close in to "Panchito" for some air-to-air. Chris is an exceptional pilot, flying formation like a pro. He's also very young, perhaps the youngest active Mustang pilot out there. This shot was pretty tough to get. A full prop arc is every air-to-air photographer's dream, but hard to achieve in sharp focus, since shutter speeds are usually so slow (1/50th to 1/25th sec) that camera shake blurs the image. I was very fortunate on this one. It's not perfect, but still pretty sharp. I wish that the background had been more interesting though,
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This is Larry Kelley's Cessna UC-78 Bobcat after a heavy rain shower at the 2003 Georgetown Fly In. It is a delightful aircraft that Larry restored himself more than a decade ago. Sadly another pilot wrecked the aircraft at Oshkosh a few years ago. It is now under very slow rebuild at Larry Kelley's base in Georgetown, Delaware. UC-78's were known as Cranes in Canadian service. On a technical note; I often use a circular polarizer filter for shots like these. It really helps pull out the reflections in the water.
I was fortunate to fly out to the 2007 Thunder Over Michigan airshow in a mass formation of five B-25 bombers, two P-47's, a P-40 and a P-51. It was one of those serendipitous moments where pilots decide to make some fun out of a long journey. We all took off from separate airfields, and met up at specific points along the way before arriving en-masse at Ypsilanti. It was quite an adventure, and most of the aircraft took turns coming up behind us in "Panchito" to have their photographs taken. The two P-47D's came in very close. Here you can see Terry Rush flying "No Guts, No Glory" with Dan Dameo in "Jacky's Revenge". They were so close at times that it felt like I could feel the breeze from their propellers!
