What if you could take a modern DSLR camera back in time to shoot war planes? The military aviation photography community is pretty damn small and Lyle Jansma is a virtual time traveler that gets to warp back to ages gone by to capture the most amazing warbirds in their natural environment.
Lyle has traveled the globe in his pursuit of warbird photographic glory and has shot the majority of piston powered legends that still prowl the skies. Like so many other aviation photogs, the craft more or less found him instead of the the other way around. Lyle is also one of the top real estate photographers in the Pacific Northwest, and sits as the resident aerial photographer for both the Tillamook Air Musuem/Erickson Collection and the Heritage Flight Museum up in Bellingham, Washington.
Lyle, who calls his aviation photography business Aerocapture Images, has also come up with an exciting way to blend his real estate photography skills with his passion for historic aviation. This nexus of creativity and virtual reality is called “Cockpit 360” and is available at the iTunes app stores. This little application takes some of the most notable aircraft collections, such as Boeing’s Museum of Flight and the National Museum of the USAF at Wright Patterson AFB, and allows you to virtually explore the cockpits within their collection.
It really is an amazing application and the technology has begun to change the way people experience historic aircraft collections, which usually allow little to no access to the most interesting part of their aircraft: the cockpits! Try the Cockpit 360 for yourself, take a look inside famous B-17 “liberty Bell”, a P-40 Warhawk sitting on the historic ramp at Hickam field in Hawaii, and a P-51 Mustang air racer getting serviced during the Reno Air Races!
If you have it on your bucket list to go breathe the sweet exhaust of a rumbling Merlin engine and take some photos like the ones seen here, you can attend one of Lyle’s air-to-air seminars where you can learn the techniques of air to air photography and go up to shoot P-51’s, P-47s, B-17s, and tons of other flying legends while flying high over scenic wilderness. Click here to read more about this one and lifetime opportunity. And enjoy some more of Lyle Jansma’s fabulous time-bending work!: