There are plane spotters, and then there is this guy. This activity usually involves bringing your longest telephoto lens, sitting just outside of an important airport and trying to catch the multitude of airplanes landing and taking off there.
Of course, like in any other competitive activity that involves collecting (images of planes, in this case), the rarer the subject, the more valuable the catch. So, by these standards, shooting a Cessna would be considered amateurish. Only this time it's not the subject that mattered the most, but the execution itself.
And it almost turned into an execution in more ways than one when the guy taking the photo - Instagram user mekki.jaidi and real life person Sébastien Politano - insisted on taking a photo of a landing Cessna just as it was going a few feet over a busy road. And even fewer inches over his head. He had the nerve to hold his ground and focus on getting the image, and his head-ducking reflex would have come too late anyway had the plane descended just a fraction lower.
That looks like a pretty dangerous place to be with or without a camera tied to your neck. And, in fact, it is: the Gustaf III Airport in St Barts is renowned for its tricky landing approaches, probably caused by the higher grounds that need to be cleared at relatively low altitude. So low that had Sébastien Politano been only a little taller, his scalp would now be in stitches, if not worse.
Whoever tried photography at least once knows that the world appears different when looked at through the camera's viewfinder. I seriously doubt that Sébastien would have been just as brave had somebody taken his camera away. There's one thing to risk your life for a memory only you will have, and a completely different one to do it for a picture you can share with the rest of the world. Unless you end up dead, of course. Then it's all the same.
A photo posted by Mekki Jaidi (@mekki.jaidi) on Apr 7, 2016 at 4:28am PDT
The author claims the plane even touched his shutter finger, but I think that's more folklore than actual fact. It doesn't appear to be the case in the video and, anyhow, with that mass and velocity involved, it would have had to be a microscopic contact for him not to feel it a lot more severely than that. Here is the video of the incident (available in 360 degrees).
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