Boneyard
By Troy Paiva
17 April 2007
The first time I was granted night photo access to an airliner boneyard was at Mojave airport in 1990. Even though I had only been doing night photography / light-painting a short time, I immediately knew that these places would become my favorite locations.
Since then I've also shot similar facilities at Tucson and Kingman, AZ. At any given time there are a half dozen planes in various states of disassembly in these junkyards. Some airframes, nearly complete, have only a few high value parts removed. Others, are just broken chunks of random fuselage, stacked on piles of railroad ties or flopped on their bellies in the dirt. After all remaining salable parts are removed, the skeletal fuselage is dragged to the recycling area, systematically dismantled, shredded, and melted into raw aluminum ingots.
In the summer of 2006 I finally got into "Aviation Warehouse" located at El Mirage Dry Lake, in a remote corner of California's High Desert, 100 miles north of Los Angeles. I'd been eyeing it for years through the fence, the owner virtually impossible to reach. Unlike the other yards I'd shot in the past, AW supplies the film industry with aeronautical props as well as operating as a typical scrap and salvage operation. There's literally 100s of aircraft stored there from tiny Cessnas to wide-body airliners, all organized in strangely artistic piles among the twisted Joshua Trees. Gigantic fuselages lay broken, painted flat black to simulate movie plane crashes. There are tattered twin-tailed 30s prop-liners and cockpit sections from every type of aircraft you can think of from the last 50 years. It's more museum than junkyard.
Poking around in these places filled with dead aircraft at night is an unforgettable experience. Chopped and gutted like fish, their huge tails lay in the sand, weeping fluids and moaning in the harsh desert wind. Virtually untouched airframes stand in line on flat tires, as if awaiting final departure- monuments to dead technology. Once the shining glory of many nations, the ultimate in technology, today they are only trash. The boneyard at night is a staggeringly evocative and romantic place, an entropical paradise.
All this work was shot at various locations over the last 16 years using both film and digital cameras. They were shot using time-exposures at night, within a few nights of the full moon. The colored lighting was added with hand-held strobe-flashes and flashlights covered with theatrical lighting gels. While there is some multi-exposure compositing, contrast adjustments and minor cloning on some of these, the lighting FX and color are all done in-camera. These are not Photoshop creations.
To view more Aviation Warehouse pix:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lostamerica/sets/72157594233060737/
To view my older film work shot in various boneyards:
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