Steinmetz, ’79, is the world’s best known-perhaps the only-professional photographer to make images while flying in a custom-made motorized glider. It’s an episode Steinmetz would rather not dwell on-“Everyone always wants a crash story,” he said with a sigh when we first spoke-perhaps because it belies the years of experience and meticulous planning required to shoot pictures from what looks to the untrained eye like a flying lawn chair. The May 2008 issue of Geographic features a picture of him on the operating table after the mishap, which did not make his family back home in New Jersey happy. Steinmetz rested for a day and went back to work shooting aerial photographs of China for National Geographic magazine. Steinmetz was “a bloody mess,” scraped and bruised, a branch through his cheek, but otherwise “operational.” A doctor at a Chinese provincial hospital put 19 stitches in his face. The next thing he remembers is waking up on the ground, his French flying partner standing over him asking if he could wiggle his feet. He banked sharply, then saw the rapid approach of a tree and heard the sound of his propeller shattering. As Steinmetz explains in the video, the motorized paraglider's long flight time and capabilities makes it possible to not just photograph the immediate landscape, but explore the wider world around it.Ĭheck out the full video above for a dose of Friday inspiration.Moments after liftoff, George Steinmetz knew he was headed for an unscheduled landing. He goes on to introduce a video of how the paraglider works before highlighting some of the most striking aerial footage and photos taken from it.įor most of us, a drone presents photographers with the closest we can get to Steinmetz style of capture, but that's still not quite the same as a paraglider. 'It dawned on me that this crazy little aircraft I was flying would open up a new way of seeing remote parts of the African landscape in a way that had never really been possible before,' Steinmetz explains in the video, pointing out that a typical airplane moves too fast for this type of photography, and a helicopter is too loud with too much downdraft. Steinmetz explains that he gets a flight time of about two hours, during which he gets an 'unobstructed view both horizontally and vertically.' The motorized paraglider is composed of a wing in the style of a parachute and a backpack motor, holding 10 liters of fuel and offering a speed up to 30MPH / 48KPH. This vantage point gives Steinmetz a unique look at the world below, including its various cultures and landscapes. During a new 10-minute TED Talk, famed National Geographic aerial photographer George Steinmetz talks about his experiences photographing Africa while flying around in a motorized paraglider.

African air george steinmetz