Given just 15 minutes to photograph the F-35A Lightning II, most professional photographers would choose a digital camera with a massive memory card and shoot nonstop. Jeremy Blakeslee showed up for his assignment at Luke Air Force Base with an old-school film camera, and made only a few photos.
The San Francisco photographer was given a rare opportunity to photograph the airplane, and brought along two manual Hasselblad medium-format cameras. In addition to granting him very little time to do the job, the Air Force also required Blakeslee to stay 20 feet from the plane. He worked frantically to make every shot count, darting around for the best position and light. A digital camera like the Canon 5D Mark II would have allowed him to fire off 100 or so photos. Instead, he came back with 30, eight of which are published here for the first time.
Blakeslee shoots exclusively on film, both professionally and personally, because he likes the intentionality of it. Every shot counts, and costs money, requiring greater attention to composition. Film rewards precision. "You really have to slow it down and calculate things in your head," he says. "The whole process of shooting film is very meditative."
The photographer tried to highlight the plane's angles and sharp lines. To capture these details from 20 feet away, he used a 120mm lens. He was working in the middle of the afternoon, when the light creates harsh shadows, but the planes were parked beneath canopies that diffused the light. At some point in the shoot, Blakeslee says he went into a trance. He'd figured out his exposure and his approach, and was able to simply shoot. "It was actually pretty zen," he says.
After the shoot he returned home, scanned the negatives, and sent the photos to the Air Force for approval. Two friends on the base had arranged the shoot, and Blakeslee wanted to tread carefully. He worried the brass might reject some of his photos, but every one was approved.
Still, Blakeslee is cautious about the photos and subject matter. The F-35, already two decades in development, has been plagued by spiraling budgets, production delays and system malfunctions. He doesn’t want the plane's problems to overshadow his images, which---as a fan of military history---he hopes stand on their own as a visual record of the most expensive weapons system yet created. "There has been a lot of bad press about the F-35, but they are really incredible aircraft," he says.
