The best Pictures are Taken Unexpectedly

For more than 30 years Flying Focus has been a household name in the area of maritime aerial photography. Vessels in action, sea trials, maiden voyages, special cargo transports, oil platforms, offshore wind farms, name it and Herman IJsseling, owner of Flying Focus, had it in front of his lens. In October 2014, IJsseling definitely moved his business to the Flying Focus hangar at the airport of the isle of Texel.

After graduating from secondary school IJsseling came in contact with aerial photography and it caught his interest: “I wrote little articles for an aviation magazine, was paid per page and figured that if I had a lot of photos, I didn’t need a lot of text and that would be easy money. I bought a camera for a reasonable price from someone who sold cameras to 80 per cent of the aerial photographers and his tips helped me to master the profession. My first flight was on my own initiative to create a portfolio to attract possible clients, on 19 February 1985. I took pictures of the ice in the Wadden Sea, of TESO, the ferry between Den Helder and Texel, that became my first client. In 1987 I was asked to photograph the sea trials of a trawler and the pictures were published in a trade journal for the fishing industry. Clearly there was a demand in the market for this kind of photography as from that moment on the telephone started to ring.”

Strategic location

Flying Focus’s client base does not only consist of Dutch shipping companies and shipyards, he can also count companies from Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, as well as Abu Dhabi, Australia and Singapore to his clients. “Most of them have vessels, oil platforms of jack-ups on the North Sea, my working area”, explains IJsseling. “Texel is a strategic location as it is near the shipping lanes, offshore wind farms and oil and gas platforms. Sometimes we fly to the Baltic Sea or the Irish Sea, we have also been to Brittany in France. We do about 250 flights per year, of which about 90 per cent are in commission.”

During the 1990s the company grew from 50 to 200 flight hours. Therefore, in 1999, IJsseling decided to buy his own plane, a single-engined Cessna 172, to get more out the flights and to become more flexible. In 2001 a second plane, a single-engined Cessna 152, was bought. Next to graduating from the University of Applied Photography, IJsseling also got his pilot’s license in 2001. The aerial photographer works with two administrative colleagues and a pool of about ten freelance pilots from amongst others KLM and the Royal Navy. “It is a difficult metier, I only want to work with experienced people and the teamwork between pilot and photographer is important, it needs to be based on mutual trust. Since getting my pilot’s licence, I take better pictures as I know how the plane works and what I can ask of the pilot. The closer you can get to the vessel, the better and more dynamic the photos become and the best pictures are taken unexpectedly.”

Storm flights

Flying Focus became very well known through their images of ships in bad weather conditions taken during freelance storm flights. IJsseling comments: “Storm flights are big fun as well as a great challenge, we do about four to five per year. In 2003, during a storm flight in the single-engined Cessna we heard the waves and it made us think about the safety. Therefore we bought a twin-engined Cessna 337 in 2004, which performs beyond expectations, it can fly in winds up to ten Beaufort, which delivers beautiful pictures.” The planes are customised for photo flights; they all have a marine VHF radio, as being able to communicate with the vessels I photograph is crucial, are equipped with special photo hatches and an extra fuel tank which enables me to fly for eight hours. For safety reasons we made the doors ejectable and placed two emergency beacons on the plane, one on top and one on the bottom, which will be on top in case of a crash in the water.”

Next to taking pictures by order, Flying Focus sells stock material, photo books and calendars. IJsseling: “We have about 75,000 photos in our database and up until now I am sure I took at least one million photos.”

Gail van den Hanenberg