Aerial landscape photographer Andro Loria explains how his passion for aerial photography took off
“Photography gives me… I don’t know if it’s a purely creative outlet because I do create other things,” begins Andro Loria. “But it’s an outlet for doing something different to what I do on the ground. It completely engages my mind. There’s so much planning involved, but a lot of unknown elements too – if you want to call it that, there is an element of adventure.”
Andro honed his imaging skills doing landscape photography on his various travels. A lecturer and research scientist in the field of neuroscience by day, Andro is known in the photography world for his abstract aerial depictions of natural features.
“I studied landscape photography in Iceland, working alongside other people. I realised something while trying to learn from these experts – not just in photography, but in local weather patterns and landscape types. They were teaching me to calculate what your exposure should be and when the sun will be in a particular spot in the sky to get the perfect visual.
“I realised working in this way isn’t exactly me. I wasn’t into this wide-angle lens, filter, tripod, carefully orchestrated landscape photography. When some of my pictures did get into magazines, they weren’t premeditated ones – they were made on the move.
“At one point, I had a camera on a tripod photographing long exposures of geothermal vents. But then I saw a person walking on a hill, approaching the summit – I grabbed my second camera and started making images of that, and forgot about the first camera. And those instinctive photos were the better ones.”
Andro’s first experience of aerial photography was in a hot air balloon ride over London – a gift from his wife. It was a transformative encounter, and led him to pursue a return to the vistas of Iceland, but this time from the air.
Taking to the skies
“Being a scientist, I consider myself an explorer. I like seeing the unknown, knowing the unknown, finding something people haven’t seen before. That’s why I wasn’t happy making landscape pictures many people had already done before me,” Andro explains.
“I get it – at art school you draw the classics, right? But once you develop your technique to a certain level, there comes a time to start asking what you want to do with those skills.”
Aerial photography – offering the combination of a more reactive form of image making with an opportunity to create more abstract framings of the natural world – was the ideal prospect for Andro.
“When I took my first flight, it was like when you’re a kid and it’s your first time on a bicycle,” he recalls. “Everything is in your face and it’s over fast. You’re lucky if you can see things through this visual overload. And you’re very lucky if you can get some good photos. Once you’re in the air, everything happens so fast, you have to act instinctively.
“When you work from an open window in a plane and stick your head out with a camera, lots of wind hits your eye. So, it’s only an initial image you’ll see because your EVF will be covered in crystallised tears and your eye gets defocused by the wind.
“You have to learn to predict how elements will combine in three-dimensional space. You can, of course, adjust your altitude to add detail or move to a view that’s attracted your attention. But you don’t always recognise the reason why you’ve photographed something in the moment – you just do it. Later, when you look through the frames, it’s like ‘Aha, I see it.’”
Making preparations
A lot of work goes into planning a flight path, Andro explains, and everything needs to be approved by the pilot. “If I’ve been to the area before, I may have seen something amazing during a trek and would love to fly nearby and take a better look.
“For new areas – for instance, when I went to Kenya last year – I work with satellite images. These days, there is good enough resolution to understand the patterns. You can zoom in to the point of altitude where we usually fly and see how it looks from 3000 feet.
“I will put a lot of placemarks down, and then once you zoom out you can look at the clusters of them and start planning the best possible route, bearing in mind we will have two, maybe three loops around each spot.”
“You’re limited by fuel and time, so you have to think where the nearest airstrip is and come up with a contingency plan. What will I do if the weather turns bad?
“Then you talk to your pilot, and they say, ‘No, this is crazy at this time of year, there’s too much wind.’ Now, you can fly in wind, but if there’s more than 20-25 knots, when you start banking you become a big sail. Then it becomes more difficult and dangerous, so we don’t do that.
“So, you pre-plan again, maybe the day before with your pilot. Everything depends on the winds, weather patterns, temperatures, level of sunshine, cloud cover and so on. I’ve had a few situations where we were ready to take off and it was all called off because the weather changed. It happens. Patience in photography is a great skill – in aerial photography, even more so.”
Once in the air, communication between photographer and pilot becomes more difficult. “You will agree to circle a zone of interest with, say, a 300-metre radius,” Andro continues. “We can start at 1000 feet and go up, or we can start at 3000 feet and slowly go down.
“But when you lean out to make a photo, you shut your mic off because so much wind goes into it. It’s a huge amount of white noise, which isn’t pleasant for the pilot.”
Andro pays particular tribute to the Icelandic pilot Haraldur Diego, who passed away in 2022. They were frequent collaborators, completing many flights together over a period of four years, with Haraldur’s own photographic skills helping them synergise effortlessly.
“You develop a sign language after a while,” Andro notes. “After we flew a few times together, it got to where I would just point my camera and we didn’t even need to speak.”
The best cameras for aerial photography
“Right now, I use two FUJIFILM GFX100 bodies,” notes Andro, “and it’s probably my favourite camera ergonomically, for the old-style dials.” Having tactile control over exposure settings without having to dig into fiddly menus is critical when working in freezing and bumpy conditions.
“I will bring two identical bodies on a flight with me, with different lenses attached. You have no time to reconfigure when you have to grab a photo fast,” he adds. “And when you have certain muscle memory to a specific camera body – and your fingers might be half frozen – you don’t have time to get things wrong, you’ll just miss your photo.
“I use zoom lenses, as they give maximum agility in terms of how close you can be to the subject. You can do three loops on the same altitude and just play with the focal length.
“There’s the FUJINON GF45-100mmF4 R LM OIS WR, which is very me. I had started with the GF32-64mmF4 R LM WR, but quickly realised most of my photos were in the longer part of the zoom, and I was longing for something that went into the 70 to 80mm range. The GF45-100mmF4 gave me exactly that – when I check the metadata of my photos, the majority are from between 60 and 85mm.
“I also have the GF100-200mmF5.6 R LM OIS WR on a second body, so I can quickly grab it and it gives me much more extension. It’s great if you want to compress things a little.
“Plus, I keep a second GF45-100mmF4 with me as a backup lens. I’ve never had any problems so far, but I guess it’s like having an umbrella in England – when you have it with you it never rains,” Andro laughs.
“One thing that’s important is taking the lens hood off, because it becomes a massive sail in the wind. We’re talking about 60-knot speeds, with the wind adding another 20 knots or so. Also, these planes are very small, confined spaces. It’s like a seat in a kayak, so you don’t have much space to move around. Having extra length on your equipment doesn’t help.
“It may be that smaller camera bodies are better suited because of this, but I want the biggest and best picture I can make – that’s why I choose GFX System cameras. Half of the function buttons are disabled because I don’t want to change anything by accident while being buffeted around. I have three or four buttons in specific positions doing certain things, like changing ISO or giving me the histogram.”
Working from a speeding plane, Andro needs to set his exposure to freeze the moment perfectly. “I work at 1/1000 sec typically. I can go up or down a bit – for a lateral photo I can go to 1/640 sec, but for a top-down photo I can’t go lower than 1/800 sec.
“I have to say that the image sensor stabilisation of the GFX100 is superb. It just works. With a 102-megapixel sensor, you can see every movement, every vibration in the image – so the fact the IBIS works so well is amazing.”
With no time to check his results until long after landing, Andro finds there’s a certain analogue charm in his post-production process.
“You know what your favourite frames are when you make them,” he enthuses. “When I come home and go into the files, I always go to three or four specific frames first. ‘Did it work?’ There’s this kind of darkroom development moment, when suddenly that magic appears again in front of you.
“That’s the best moment, when you see it’s spot on, because you don’t have time up there to see it in the viewfinder. I trust technology a lot, and have to give all kudos to Fujifilm cameras – they actually nail it.
“When I make photographs, I make them for myself. First and foremost, I make photographs of what I love,” Andro concludes. “I love wild nature – I try to have it pristine. Nature makes the art, I just try and put it in the frame as well as possible.”
