David Taylor catches up with aerial photographer extraordinaire and ‘The Changing Face of London’ chronicler Jason Hawkes and hears how London has changed, particularly over the last 15 years from his birds’ eye perspective; about his hairy moments and near-misses in helicopters; drones, and the biggest bane of Hawkes’ life – people stealing his output online.
David Taylor: Hi Jason. How are you?
Jason Hawkes: Hi. Yeah; not bad!
DT: What have you been up to?
JH: I’m just doing a load of edits for some footage I shot a couple of months ago. I did about five days’ filming and I’m just editing it down because I’m not doing any flying at the minute.
DT: Oh, you’re not? Why?
JH: Well, today, just because the weather’s not good enough. I’m just editing stuff to put on my website.
DT: So, how does it work? Have you got some kind of season ticket arrangement with the helicopter guys you use? (laughs)
JH: (laughs) I wish! No. Whatever job comes up I find, if it’s in London I tend to use the same helicopter operator. They’ve got five pilots, and three or four helicopters. So, I will give them a call. I’ve worked with them for years, so I’ll just give them a buzz and say, well the next job coming up is… and we’ll just discuss it and pencil in a date. That often… well, always moves, just because of the weather. Sometimes you’ll pencil in one day; sometimes you’ll pencil in the whole week. You make a yes/no decision later, either the day before, or even just on the day. But you might go there and not fly because the conditions aren’t quite suitable.
DT: Is that out of Battersea or somewhere?
JH: No, it’s from Redhill. There aren’t any operators based in Battersea. They just come in from somewhere else and pick you up or drop you off. It’s not a very good place to fly from. It’s incredibly expensive.
DT: So: How did you get into all of this?
JH: I studied photography, and when I was about 21, I started assisting fashion photographers or still life photographers; anybody I could really work for in London. I was doing it for a few months and I went flying in a microlight with a couple of friends of mine one weekend, and thought what a laugh it was. Obviously, it was years and years ago, way before drones or anything like that ever existed, so the only way you could take a picture from the sky was physically getting up there yourself. So I went flying in a microlight; the flying was quite fun but it wasn’t really the flying that got me; it was what you could see. I thought oh, that’s just absolutely unbelievable. I very naively bought one (a microlight) about two months later. I started flying around the countryside for a couple of months taking pictures of stuff.
DT: How do you do that while you’re piloting?
JH: Well, you are with somebody. It was a friend of mine that got his licence; I never quite got mine but he got his. You can’t actually make money flying, we soon found out… legally anyway. So very quickly I started approaching people and publishers and managed to get a book deal on London, and obviously you can’t fly a microlight in London, so just after I guess about five months I started shooting from helicopters, and have been doing it ever since.
