Amazing Photo Composites of Airplanes Landing or Departing from Around the World

Some people like sitting down to watch airplanes taking off or landing, but photographer Mike Kelley took that fascination to a different level. He sets up camp outside of the airports to photograph the flight paths of hundreds of flights a day. He then takes all the images to photoshop isolating the airplane to create a composite will all the airplanes on that route.

 

This editing process is very straight forward with airplanes that are taking off, normally leaving them in the same position as they were photographed. For landing is a different story: “For the landing images, I did take slight artistic liberty with the position of the aircraft, because in real life the planes follow a very specific glide path to the touchdown point,” Kelley shares with Colossal. “If I hadn’t moved them, all the planes would be directly on top of one another and there’d be no real dynamics or movement in the image.”, Kelley mentions.

 

Although when he started the project two years ago, the weather conditions around European airports were pretty stable, soon he realized that this was not the case for other airports around the world like in Japan, for example. Sometimes he has had to return to the same location after several unsuccessful trials. In any case, to date you can see 19 of these “airportraits” available for purchase or you can also follow his work on Instagram. (Story via Colossal)