philip makanna
a
time
remembered

 

 
BY DAVE HOWARD- I first met Philip Makanna in June of 1994. I was in San Francisco, covering the VISCOMM West show at Moscone Center for the now defunct Camera & Darkroom magazine. While scurrying from the show floor to a seminar, a man spotted the Buick Club of America jacket that I was wearing and flagged me down. He didn't have a Buick, but wanted to know if I might know of a Cadillac club, as he was restoring a 1961 model. I didn't have time to chat, but said that I'd send him the address when I returned home. He gave me his business card, on the back of which I hurriedly jotted "Caddy club info" and streaked for my seminar.
. Following the show I was sorting through the collected fistful of business cards, checking the backs for any needed action, when I got to the one with the Caddy info request. The front of the card bore the name Philip Makanna, an image of a WW II fighter, and the word "Ghosts" beside it. A light bulb flickered to life. For several years, during my annual fall hunt for the next year's calendars, I had seen and admired a large (14x20" closed, 20x28" opened) calendar of WW II aircraft, all photographed air-to-air and in full color, bearing the GHOSTS title. 

. Suspecting that this calendar was the work of the photographer whose card I was holding, and picking up the editorial scent of a possible story, I so enquired when forwarding details on the Cadillac-LaSalle Club. Sure enough, it was, and an interview was agreed to. Philip's heavy shooting schedule, combined with production of his latest book, would postpone our getting together until the following year. 

. Upon arriving at the Makanna's lovely home overlooking San Francisco Bay, and after a thorough inspection by Fatso, Stinky and Lulu, the resident cats, we settled into Philip's downstairs editing room, adjacent to the darkroom, to discuss this fascinating niche that he has carved for himself in the diverse realm of photography. 

Camera Arts: Air-to-air photography of vintage aircraft is a rather specialized photographic niche. How did you become involved with it?
Philip Makanna: By a turn of fate. When I was a little boy I loved airplanes, grew up in the shadow of airplanes, my heroes were pilots. But I dropped it when I was thirteen, as most little boys do, moving on to other big boy things. 

. I started out as a painter, then wandered off into sculpture, and then film and video. I made several feature films for the local PBS station, then the American Film Institute, and a bunch of N.E.A. grants. The next step was to do a proper feature film with a proper budget, but I just couldn't raise the budget. I started doing still photography with a camera my mother got me. I started doing slides, and I've never done anything other than transparencies. I've never gone through any kind of "proper" photographic training. The process, coming from painting to where I am now, has all, to me, been very logical; I feel that I'm doing the same thing that I started out doing when I was a painter. 

. I went out on a job for a women's sports magazine, to Reno, photographing some women sky divers. There were some World War II airplanes there, recreating the battle of Pearl Harbor. I thought that was funky and interesting, and I took some pictures of it. I had those pictures in my case when I went back to New York to try to sell a book on little traveling circuses, you know, two elephants, one toothless tiger, that I had
 been working on. Wonderful stuff, but the airplane pictures caught somebody's fancy, and became my first book, GHOSTS, which was a moderate success. Then my wife, Jean, and I decided to publish a calendar of the pictures, because we couldn't get a publisher interested at the time. That was before the explosion in calendars, about 1984. We started the GHOSTS calendar in 1980. We wedged our butts into a corner and decided to do this big calendar, which everybody advised us not to do. Somehow we survived the first five years, and then everybody and his brother was making calendars. By then we had gained acceptance, and were selling the calendar to B. Dalton and Walden's, staying a couple of inches ahead of the mob. Now it's known internationally; everyone in aviation knows about the GHOSTS calendar. 
. So fate has guided the whole thing. As I started out life with airplanes, the airplanes came back to me. Now they're my life. Most of my friends are plane guys, I don't know many photographers.

CA: When you were first getting into this field, were there any other air-to-air photographers whose work inspired you?
PM: Bill Crump has been my very good friend from the beginning, now a Dallas-based photographer. We were young men together, worked together, supported each other throughout, but I don't think aviation photography has ever been an image before me. I think what's defined the look of my work is what I've been chasing after that began in fine arts. There aren't many aviation photographers that I know of. It's a very closed crowd; there just isn't that much room in the sky. One photo plane and a subject; after that it gets very complicated very fast. There aren't that many people who practice air-to-air photography consistently, full time, and have a body of work that is meaningful. But there is a strong gang of young English men that are beginning to make their mark in airplane photography and a couple of Americans. 

CA: What format do you use and why?
PM: Thirty-five millimeter, because the machinery works so well. I use a pair of Nikon F4s and Nikkor zoom lenses. In my kind of aviation photography, you have to have all the help you can get. Automatic exposure, automatic focus, automatic anything, is a plus. It raises the ratio of success. When I go out to photograph, I'm not in control of the situation. I have to survive, and surviving plus getting proper exposures, keeping the thing in focus, is a major project. I'm out there really as a composer; the camera is doing the work. Also, 35mm fits into the space that I'm allowed, a space out to about here (indicates a point approximately a foot in front of his face). If you get beyond that space, you're out into a 170 mph wind.

CA: I gather, then, that you mostly shoot from an open cockpit?
PM: Not always, but I shoot from the back seat of a T-6 with the canopy rolled back around 97% of the time. The cover of the book (GHOSTS of the Skies: Aviation in the Second World War) was taken out the tail of a B-25 that I know and love, through Plexiglas, and it's sharp enough, but shooting through Plexiglas hurts, it definitely does. 

CA: What film do you prefer, and what characteristics contribute to that preference?
PM: Velvia, underexposed a third of a stop. The grain is tight and the saturation is good. I used to shoot Kodachrome, which tended toward the red side. Velvia seems to have all the colors. The look that I like in a picture is high color saturation and sharpness, which Velvia delivers.

 
CA: Your work that I'm familiar with is all color. Have you ever shot black-and-white for a "forties" look?
PM: No, I never have. I came out of painting, I was a colorist. I've never been able to draw. To me, black-and-white and drawing have a similarity. I always felt very comfortable as a painter in areas of color, and when I wandered out of movie-making into still photography I immediately went to making slide shows. The new book is essentially a slide show. I developed it with the idea that the continuous logic of a slide show would read sequentially and that there would be a story involved. The end result of that slide show will be a CD ROM, a super slide show that will contain everything. So, no, I've never done black-and-white. My photography has come to me from the Nikon manual and from personal experience. Painting is what I lean on.

CA: Do you do any of your own lab work, and if not, how did you settle on a lab that delivers consistent results?
PM: I process the film at the New Lab, in San Francisco, which is a terrific lab, having been strong and consistent for me for many many years. The reason I dropped Kodachrome was Kodak's switch from their own processing labs. All of a sudden it really went bad, and I was a lost boy for awhile. The only other thing was Ektachrome, which was awful. Thank God Fuji came along.

. After film processing, we do everything here. We make the prints; all the pictures you have seen published came from Cibachrome (Ilfochrome) prints. I've always felt that the Cibachromes had the look that I wanted. I don't do any masking. I choose pictures that I know will print without it. There's a whole range of contrasty transparencies that I still have in my archives that maybe, with the digital stuff, I'll be able to balance. For now, if they don't print on Ciba, then nobody ever sees them.

CA: What are some of the hazards and safety concerns relative to this activity?
PM: The hazards of aviation photography are certainly very serious, and the consequences are very great. There are very few WW II airplanes flying these days; it's a very small crowd of people that fly them and massage them, and every year we lose thirty or forty people to accidents of one type or another. I've seen some god-awful accidents. When the planes go down, they go down in a terrible, terrible way. They're big, they're fast, they're very heavy, and they fall like stones, carrying everybody with them. It's a violent sport, a violent game. The people I work with are very good at it, but a small mistake can be very serious.

CA: Do you choreograph your shoots extensively beforehand, or do you do a lot of on-location ad-libbing?
PM: You have to ad-lib. The hand of fate won't allow you to define what's going to happen. You saw those drawings I made; I always try to describe what I think should happen, and we all try politely to fit into that perceived, hoped-for event. As today we took off headed toward the Golden Gate Bridge; at 12:30 when we passed the bridge it was lovely, and when we came back for photography at 2:30 there was only one tower showing and a little hollow of ground visible through the clouds. So all of a sudden the whole event changed, with too many planes to stuff into the space (the small clearing in the clouds), and it was not working. You can't control things; the factor of weather is too powerful, the factor of mechanical problems is too powerful, all the little mistakes that can happen. Often you go up and you can't even find each other. We try to choreograph it, but good luck!

CA: How do you obtain your head-on shots?
PM: I shoot out the tail of a B-25. In some situations, you can take the tail (the Plexiglas tail-gunner's bubble) off, put on a big ol' belt and tie yourself in with huge ropes tied to large parts of the airplane, and hang your feet out the back. That's terrific! It's pretty awesome to sit out there with your feet dangling out the end of the airplane, going two hundred miles an hour, with the ground five thousand feet away. The airplanes can fly right up to your feet. I've got some pictures of Steve Hinton in the Planes of Fame P-38 where I could almost kick the nose of the plane. I have a 30-year collection of pictures of my feet, but I was so stunned by the experience of having him right there that I missed that shot. All I had to do was put my feet up and I'd have had my all-time best foot shot. I blew it!

CA: Have you had any close calls?
PM: Yes; I've crashed, and there have been near-collisions in mid-air. One time we were in a formation, leading a group of large, fast airplanes, and the left fuel tank of our plane went dry and the pilot had to switch over. In the switching over, the motor stopped, and when the motor stops, the airplane stops; the other airplanes were really coming on us, just missing us. We always congratulate ourselves when we get back on the ground!

CA: What are your favorite chase aircraft? What of their features help make your photography easier?
PM: T-6s are the basis of everything that I do. They are always obtainable, always at the events, and they're affordable. They only burn thirty-five to fifty gallons an hour, at two dollars a gallon, four dollars in England. The canopy opens up, and they fly at a speed that all of the (subject) planes can fly at; even the fast fighter planes can be slowed down to the speed of a T-6. When I fly with Eddie Van Fossen, who has won the Reno Air Races seven times, we work at 180-190 mph.

CA: Is rough air ever a problem for you, either in terms of physical comfort or as a hindrance to sharp images?
PM: If the air is bouncy, there's no point in even going up. Smooth air is essential. If the camera is bouncing around, it blurs; for me, the pictures have to be sharp. As for physical discomfort, I get air sick terribly. I didn't get sick today, but I got close to the edge in Breckenridge (TX) a couple of days ago. There's nothing worse; you get up there and the airplane is bouncing around, and looking through the camera you get into this swimming-eye thing, and it's hot, and it's smelly, and yuck!

CA: Noting that you wear glasses, do the high-eyepoint finders on your Nikons deal successfully with your air-borne viewing needs?
PM: Yes; I don't wear contacts. I do have a special pair of glasses that have the lenses screwed to the frames. In the past, I've hit (air) bumps and knocked my (eyeglass) lens out; when that happens, I'm finished for the day! So that's one of my "secrets" of the trade.

CA: Are high shutter speeds and fast films the only remedies available when shooting from fast-moving, vibration-prone aircraft?
PM: You can't shoot faster than 1/250 sec.; over that speed, the propeller is frozen. You need a "smear" on the propeller to get the feeling that it's not a model airplane suspended against the sky. Below 1/250th, if the air is smooth, to get the full arc of the propeller you have to be down around 1/30 sec. At 1/30th, it's just a matter of luck that the picture is sharp. But, take twenty frames at 1/30 sec. and one of them, by the grace of God, will be sharp. And that's the one that I show.

. As for fast films, I don't use them; I like the close grain of Velvia.

CA: What type of lighting do you favor?
PM: I like to go up really early or really late. But there is a point where really early is too early, and really late is too late. We sometimes get to feeling real sassy and get out in the darkness, starting up at 6:30, before the sun comes over the horizon and we go out to meet the sun, but more often than not, that doesn't work. It's hard to light (supplemental) in my photography! We like to go at dawn; that's always the best time, the air is the quietest and the light is rich.

CA: Do you have any depth-of-field concerns?
PM: I shoot shutter priority, and whatever the camera decides is going to be the depth-of-field, that's what it is. I'm not in control of that. Depth of field is not a factor for me; shutter speed is.

CA: I can remember from my NASA days that reflections were always a problem when shooting through canopies. How do you deal with that problem?
PM: I try not to shoot through canopies. If I am in the tail of a B-25, shooting through Plexiglas, I try to wear dark clothes to avoid reflections, but that's not normally a problem for me; 97% of the time, the canopy's open.

CA: How far have you ranged world-wide in pursuit of vintage aircraft?
PM: Well, I've gotten to New Zealand, that's been spectacular, also Australia, and I go to England every year. England has really become a second home for me in this work, because of Duxford and the people that fly at Duxford, Stephen Grey, and the Hannas, brilliant, brilliant pilots. Also because Duxford is part of the British museum system called the IWM (Imperial War Museum) that has an extraordinary archive in London that I lean very heavily on for my work. Of the sixty-six black-and-whites that are in the book, thirty-eight came from London, the IWM. So England has been very important, because of the ghosts. It's true ground for WW II aviation it's where it happened.

. However, the whole thing began for me in south Texas. My aviation photography grew out of Texas. Even today, I know the Texas people and airplanes better than I know the California people and airplanes.

CA: What percentage of the planes you shoot are owned by individual hobbyists as opposed to collections?
PM: In truth, most of the collections are individual hobbyists; a wealthy individual, with a lot of energy, who has created a collection and a tax shelter by making it into a museum. There are several of those individuals around that have vast collections, twenty, thirty extraordinary airplanes that they fly all the time. So, maybe eighty percent of the planes that I photograph fall under the umbrella of a collection or museum. The other twenty percent are guys that own one or two airplanes.

CA: What are some of the best collections and air shows around the country for vintage plane buffs in the U.S.?
PM: The Confederate Air Force Flying Museum is the biggest, oldest WW II airplane collection. It was created in 1957 by some crop dusters in south Texas, and has grown to be an international organization. Their annual "Airsho" (in October), held at their headquarters in Midland, is a wonderful show. The Ellington "Wings Over Houston" air show is one of the great air shows in the U.S. And the Breckenridge air show in west Texas is a great traditional air show (Memorial Day weekend; also see Breckenridge Aviation Museum) that every year attracts all sorts of private people that gather there to have a fine ol' time dropping sacks of  flour into the other guys' hangars; they make B-25 bomb runs, open the (bomb bay) doors and try to skip-bomb sacks of flour into the middle of your barbeque.

CA: This occupation has obviously kept you busy. How much time do you spend on the road and in the air?
PM: I go to about ten air shows a year. Out of twelve months, I'm away two. As for how much time I spend in the air, of those two months, I spend very little time in the air. Most of it is spent waiting and preparing for an event. But the flying and the actual photography takes place very fast, very violently, and it's gone. Four orbits to shoot one plane is normally what I do, which takes about eight minutes. I just shoot as fast as I can while it's happening.

CA: Now that you have eighteen of your GHOSTS calendars and three books under your belt, are there more unique aircraft around the world to track down and photograph?
PM: Yes, there are more airplanes all the time. When I began, there was only one Spitfire; this last year there were thirty-eight Spitfires flying. At Duxford there were fourteen Spitfires in a row on the flightline for the air show, and they all flew in a tremendous tail-chase. It was just an amazing thing to see.

. So there are more planes coming all the time. There are more coming (being discovered and restored) than are being destroyed, at least at this period of development in WW II aviation. There are some great planes coming out of caves in Russia, and being dredged out of Lake Michigan, just coming from everywhere. People are also starting to build full-scale model airplanes of planes we'll never see again. Of course they're not real WW II airplanes, but they're exact, 100% replicas, and they're exciting to see.

CA: Are there any major new projects in the works?
PM: There's the CD ROM we're working on. That's a terrific format, because it can gather so much more information than a book. In the book and the calendars the audience sees just one image, but in that image there is a range of images that imply flight and show many aspects of what that airplane is, and what those moments were like as we circled the plane. We'll see a range of black-and-white archival stuff that the books just can't hold. The CD will be a terrific vehicle because it can contain the actual sounds; Winston Churchill is speaking himself, and that's an incredibly powerful thing to hear, to hear Hitler say those words. It's better than the printed page. The music will be done by Blue Gene Tyranny, who is an extraordinary composer. So the emotional level of the CD is potentially much higher than that of the book. It's the emotional impact that I'm really trying to get to. [Ed. note: Phil Makanna showed parts of the CD in prototype form at a VISCOMM multimedia seminar at which he was a co-speaker. Having seen it, I certainly agree with his assessment of its potential.]

. I'm still trying to recover from this last book, it was exhausting, but there will be another GHOSTS book. The subject is so huge, so rich with human emotion, that I'll work all my life and never do justice to the subject.
 

The nearest thing to flying without leaving the ground