Time Lapse Photos of Nighttime Airport Traffic
Pete Mauney spends his nighttime hours hunkered down near airports to capture these these time lapse photos of arriving and departing air traffic. (He does a similar thing with fireflies.)
On Facebook, Mauney is selling prints of some of these photos, hand-printed and quality guaranteed.
All prints are lovingly made by myself and print robot Epson 3880. They are fully archival and should last until well after I am dead, assuming they are properly cared for. I am super uptight/compulsive and quality control is strict. I spent many years making my living as an exhibition printer and no image of mine will leave my hands unless I am happy with it. If something not up to spec manages to squeak through, I will happily replace.
The post also doubles as a look into the process of photography & printmaking and how to price your art.
Pricing is the hard part for me. On one side there is there $12 in materials that that make and pack each print for shipping and the minimal labor involved in making the physical objects once the hard work in photoshop is already done. Based on that I could sell them for $15 and make a profit. Then, of course, are the hours spent processing and compositing each image. Oh, and then, there is the time spent driving and flying and and actually making the images. And days spent on Google Maps and Flight Aware observing flight patterns and planning my routes and locations. The mosquitoes. Hypothermia.
But, really, I am OK with doing all of that because I will do it regardless of whether I am getting paid or not (see “compulsive” above). I do it because I fucking love it. The point of all this is not to justify my labor and obsessions. The point of this is to pay for an awesome show so I can share these in the real world with other real humans like yourselves. As stated previously, all proceeds from this sale will go towards production, materials, software, prints, monitors, frames, and all the other inevitable costs that I can’t think of right now and that keep me up at night.
I read something years ago about the expense of art and photography that’s always stuck with me. Time, materials, and equipment are one part of the equation, but really what you are paying for is the lifetime of expertise, the hundreds of thousands of their previous shots and an aesthetic honed to a razor-sharp edge. $5000 for shoot by someone who knows exactly how to get the perfect shot in just 20 minutes can seem like an outrageous price (that’s $15,000/hour!), but $1000 for an two-hour-long shoot by some doofus often isn’t going to get you the result you actually need.
So yeah, drop Mauney a line and get some great prints delivered in time for the holidays. (via jen bekman)
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