
Girls Consider Careers in Aviation
The sun shone, the planes and helicopters were ready and hundreds of girls and women flooded the second annual Girls Fly Too event, held during the International Women’s Day weekend at the Abbotsford Airport. The event is to encourage women to consider careers in the aviation industry where currently they make up less than 5% of the workforce.
A group of helicopters were kept busy both days, from 9 am to sundown, taking girls and women on free flights over the Abbotsford area.
While waiting their turn for a flight, there was lots to see and do, from exploring inside and sitting in the cockpit of a Sea King or Cormorant helicopter to trying out a few hand tools and imagining being an aircraft mechanic.
Girls Fly Too is an entirely free event thanks to the many sponsors and volunteers.
It’s a privilege to be an event photographer for such a worthy cause. Last year’s event in Langley was not quite so sunny but just as successful.
Enjoy the pictures.














For Photographers:
Everyone was thrilled with the sunny and warm weather for Girls Fly Too, everyone that is, except the photographers. Working in strong, harsh light is very challenging when photographing people. It was easy to take photos for the aircraft glimmering in the sunlight or the helicopters as they flew in front of scenic Mount Baker (above). But when you’ve got people involved, you only have a few choices.
One is to put the sun behind the subject, as in the second photo from the bottom. Then, turn the power of your flash to overexpose by one stop. Also, use the exposure compensation dial on the camera to increase the ambient exposure by one stop or so. Both of these are necessary because the camera meter sees the brightness of the sky and tries to darken the scene down to an average tone.
Another solution is to bring your subject out of the strong light. The hangar at the airport was a great place to photograph because it was shaded but also, with one large door open, there was beautiful side light to work with, as with the photo above with the single young cadet holding the magazine.
Another challenging situation was inside the aircraft cockpits where there was an extreme range of tones from the dark shade inside to the very bright light outside. Here, it’s almost impossible for a camera to record this range of tones. My solution for most of these was to supplement the light with flash to add light to the dark shadow areas. Another option would have been to use HDR but with children inside who were active, I chose not to do this.
Event photography is challenging because you never know just what you will encounter and you need to be constantly observing, looking for the situations that will help to tell the story and then to find ways to overcome the problems that are presented. When all the pieces come together, photography is joyful indeed.
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Great subject…great images Dennis!
Thanks so much, Chris!
What a great event Dennis given that the statistics for women in aviation are even worse than they are in the engineering field. Your images really tell the story. Were you changing lenses or did you cover this with a single wide ranging zoom lens?
Hi Fred, Thanks for reading and responding. I use two cameras with two lenses on an event like this and they are the 24-70 and 70-200. For this event, I also used my fisheye for a number of images because the spaces, like the cockpits, were so tight. And that allowed me to include the huge panels of switches and dials in the aircraft!
Dennis, nice work. I am having a tough time taking shots in bright light with the dark shadows. I will try your suggestion. Wonderful job taking photos of all those young ladies, some of who might become pilots one day!
Hi Bob, Thanks so much for reading and responding. Let me know how it goes working in bright light.
Dennis,
Your support for our completely free community outreach events in 2014 and 2015 is greatly appreciated, and your photos exceptional! I especially enjoyed your comments to photographers, I think those are very useful observations. In the coming weeks I will be revising the website to include this year’s photos as well as a gallery of previous year’s events. Photographer credit will be incorporated (once I figure out all the coding!) to ensure photographers are properly credited for their work! We look forward to including your work in 2016! 🙂
In the meantime we will be feeding out the photos (watermarked versions) on https://www.facebook.com/SkysNoLimitGirlsFlyToo and https://twitter.com/GirlsFly_Too to share our successful event with the world!
Thank you also for taking the time to understand the purpose behind the outreach and telling the story with such great photos.
Best Regards,
Kirsten Brazier
Founder, The Sky’s No Limit – Girls Fly Too!
Thanks very much, Kirsten. Sign me up for 2016, I’ll be there no matter where it is!