Paramotor magazineFebruary 2009
A profile of National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz who has been photographing Africa from the air since 1997
IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE anyone who has struggled to take a picture in flight green with envy. Open the pages of National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz’s new book, African Air, and the first image you see is a pretty awesome boot shot. His legs, vario and GPS all dangle a mile above a spectacular desert landscape. Wow! you think, he must be having the time of his life.
But not really. “I can see the fear in my trembling hands as I try to change lenses,” he writes in the essay, Terror at 7,500 feet, which accompanies the photograph. “This is far higher than I ever wanted to go in my paraglider.”
Steinmetz, 51, was a photographer long before he was a pilot, and he is still a “photographer who flies”, he explains from his home in New Jersey, USA.
“I don’t fly without a camera,” he says. “I got into this as a photographer.” For him, powered paragliding is not about the thrill or the discipline, it’s about the perspective. A regular photographer for National Geographic magazine since 1987, he talked them into giving him a commission to photograph the Sahara from the air a decade later in 1997.
He had first travelled through the continent as a 21-year-old, in 1979, and had lost his heart to it. He kept going back, to document the remarkable places he was seeing and people he was meeting. It was on these trips that he first thought about photographing Africa from the air...
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A profile of National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz who has been photographing Africa from the air since 1997
IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE anyone who has struggled to take a picture in flight green with envy. Open the pages of National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz’s new book, African Air, and the first image you see is a pretty awesome boot shot. His legs, vario and GPS all dangle a mile above a spectacular desert landscape. Wow! you think, he must be having the time of his life.
But not really. “I can see the fear in my trembling hands as I try to change lenses,” he writes in the essay, Terror at 7,500 feet, which accompanies the photograph. “This is far higher than I ever wanted to go in my paraglider.”
Steinmetz, 51, was a photographer long before he was a pilot, and he is still a “photographer who flies”, he explains from his home in New Jersey, USA.
“I don’t fly without a camera,” he says. “I got into this as a photographer.” For him, powered paragliding is not about the thrill or the discipline, it’s about the perspective. A regular photographer for National Geographic magazine since 1987, he talked them into giving him a commission to photograph the Sahara from the air a decade later in 1997.
He had first travelled through the continent as a 21-year-old, in 1979, and had lost his heart to it. He kept going back, to document the remarkable places he was seeing and people he was meeting. It was on these trips that he first thought about photographing Africa from the air...
Subscribe online to read the full article
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