KAILUA-KONA — In the realm of aerial photographers, you have to think Brian Powers is from the old school.
Strapping himself to the seat of a roaring 1979 Piper Cherokee four-seater, Powers takes to the air on what will be only the latest of literally hundreds of missions he’s flown out of Kona International Airport — to look where other’s don’t get to see and share his findings with the world.
“People tell me all the time, ‘I’ve lived here all my life and had no idea that was half a mile from my house up on the mountain,’” he says.
Soon, the plane which he likens to a trusty old Ford is banked in a steep turn over Hualalai Resort. Holding his camera in one hand and nursing the plane through the turn with the other, he trains his lens on the rooftops and emerald green of submerged reefs shining below him.
This juggling act is just another day on the job. But it’s the kind of work he never tires of.
— Not even after flying the coastline of every single island in the state, taking frames every 2.5 seconds and stitching the photos together into massive panoramas. Not after battling vertigo from doing spins in volcanic smog and being tossed like a leaf trying to peer into North Hawaii’s remote windward valleys.
He’s taken more than 400,000 shots since he started this business in 1989, and he’s not done yet. Not even close.
That’s because every time he goes up, he finds something new.
Prior to takeoff over the Christmas weekend, Powers points to a massive photo in his office of a moon-like expanse of lava, draining downhill and emptying into the yawning maw of a perfectly round crater hundreds of feet wide. The pit is otherworldly, like it popped out of nowhere.
But this geological feature is closer to home than most people think. Along the southwest rift of Mauna Loa, Powers gets to see a lot of surprising stuff that’s inaccessible except by air — including a holua slide used by ancient Hawaiians for a daredevil form of tropical bobsledding, which Powers found a few months ago.
It’s for discoveries like these that Powers augers sideways in the wind, firing frames through a custom hatch he’s created in his side window.
Besides amassing an awesome collection of views from the air, he’s also bought a house and raised three kids this way.
Sometimes, Powers has to remind himself go home. Like the winter day back in 2003 when he woke to find that a heavy layer of snow had fallen on the island’s peaks. Powers scrambled his plane to check it out, and found himself floating at 14,500 feet off of Kealakeua Bay, the top of Hualalai some 6,000 feet below him.
“I was four miles offshore, all by myself, looking down on a whole island without a cloud in the sky,” he recalls. “I was able to capture some of the most memorable photos. I was up there about half an hour, but my hands started to feel numb and I started to feel stupid, which is an early symptom of altitude sickness. I was getting starved of oxygen. I wanted to circle the whole island from up there, but I couldn’t it.”
Powers was honored for his contributions when the Professional Aerial Photographers Association and the Epson electronics company named him the international aerial photographer of the year for 2015, “for soaring above and beyond…and being an inspiration to his peers.” It’s not an award for which photographers submit their work. You have to be nominated by two master aerial photographers, who themselves are quite rare.
Powers said several things helped gain him notice. They include a recent profile in AOPA Pilot, the magazine of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which has 327,000 subscribers. He also credits an increasing following of his web gallery and a weekly “Aloha Monday” photo that he sends out to more than 1,500 people on an email list.
Aerial photography makes up close to 50 percent of Powers’ income these days. Another 40 percent comes from shooting corporate events from the ground. He also does historical recreations that depict the land before Captain Cook arrived.
In the aerial market, contractors, developers and real estate agents provide Powers his bread and butter. They use the images to promote their properties and even request highly precise photos shot in a series to create three-dimensional imagery.
The latter work requires painstaking flying and concentration, but it makes the fun stuff possible.
“My office window is looking down on Hawaii from a point of view a lot of other people don’t have,” Powers says. “I’ve been really lucky to combine the two passions I have, flying and photography. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Info: www.hawaiianimages.net