6 Girls and a Plane

Back in 2014 my older brother Tom had just received his pilot's license and had landed a part time job at UAC (University Air Center) in Gainesville Florida. The perks I can only assume he most appreciated were, discounted aviation fuel, and access to aircraft through well fostered relationships with some of the aircraft owners. This all meant he could rack up hours in the air at a fraction of what it would cost us lesser human beings.

Tom Came to me in 2015 with the idea of a calendar in partnership with UAC and instantly, we were carried away with the idea of a warbirds calendar. We wanted WWII planes, P-51 Mustangs, Spitfires, a B-19 Flying Fortress maybe. We had obviously fallen into a trap! We were remembering stories our Grandad had shared and we were building our own squadrons again in our heads, only we're not kids anymore and these planes are a little larger than the ones we'd had experience with about 72 times larger in fact. And in reality who can source specific rare planes on little to no budget? Even if you did have an airstrip for them to land on.

At this point we decided to scale back our plans, we asked what we had access to for free and took it from there. We had an air field, hangars, planes (mostly built between the 70's and today), and after floating some of our "assets" with Tom's local community all of a sudden we had a production team of volunteers. We brought local Gainesville photographer (Philip Marcel) on board as I thought we'd need at least two photographers. We didn't have a direction but again looked at what we had and decided on a more modern approach to warbirds. The calendar concept was thrown out of the window and we worked more closely with who the models were themselves, we just wanted to inject a little fantasy into their reality and have fun with it.

I fly down to Florida a few days before the shoot with my good friend Joe Mota in tow as support. We finalize the details and call times and we're all set to start praying for cloud cover so that we could have an epic sunrise and sunset as part of the shoot, and so we didn't have to work in 100 degree overhead Florida sun. The day of the shoot comes and it's a record high for the time of year with not a cloud in the sky! Here are a few highlights!