Braving The Storm
We are living in strange times. Fighting an invisible threat. Covid 19. Many businesses are affected, many are out of jobs and many are fighting for their lives.
Initially, I thought I’ll just do a mini project for personnel collection and not publish it like I usually do. But I guess by publishing it in a “blog” style, it is good way to remember things later down the road.
A month ago, which was about the time I started doing this project. I was still thinking covid 19 will be like another SARS but the speed in which this new little bug spread is alarming; in just about 2 weeks time the virus was spreading through Europe like wild fire. If SARS is a a320 then Covid 19 is a a380.
Over here in Singapore, things are still pretty well contained till last week, where we had quite a number of spikes from import cases.
Coming back to the project. I thought it was it was a good time to do it. Pretty much jobless now anyway. I love aviation and I’ve always wanted to photograph something aviation related. Locally, Silkair will be gone soon. Airlines are moving away from quad engines jets for obvious reasons. I believe KLM had already push forward the retirement of their 747s due to this outbreak. Airlines are also retiring their a340s from service . The a380 production will be ending soon.
While composite jets into a single photograph is nothing new. I decided to do a panorama plus composites of jets in their flight paths. Initially, I thought just do 1 picture for personnel collection and that’s it. One thing lead to another and in the end I end up doing a mini series of 4 panorama composites.
The 1st day at the airport. The weather was bad, I also realised that the a380 will take the entire length of runway 2 to get up in the air. So by the time I am able to see it over Terminal 2, it was already quite far off in the frame. I know the flight path of runway 2 will be over Changi beach so the next day, I went to the beach just to get a picture of the super jumbo in flight. The weather was good that day, plus the surprise of seeing kiteboarders at the location where I was shooting. I decided to do a another panorama with the kiteboarders. Unaware kiteboarding is a in thing there but I am aware that over at the East Coast there is the a sailing club and it is just over the flight path of runway 1. So I follow up with another panorama with sail boats on another day. Finally, you cannot not show love for the iconic Changi Airport control tower and so I did a final one just for the tower. In the end, I spend 3 days in the airport, 1 day each for the 2 beaches and countless countless hours in post.
Looking back now, I am glad that I did the series. It was a shame that I didn’t catch a passenger variant of the 747 but at least there was the SQ Cargo variant. The interesting one was the unmark a340 in the kiteboarding pano. Eventually, I did found out who it belongs to and also the reason why there is a little hump under the nose of some the a330s variant.
As of now, with all the lockdowns and travel ban. Airlines are going into hibernation mode. Trying to save every cost and overhead and ride out the storm. Soon we might hear bankruptcy, consolidation and bailout for those without deep pockets. Let’s hope this virus saga will soon be over and we can all go back to the norm.
23/03/2020