View from up in the air: Alex MacLeans’s aerial photography

There is something really magical about being up in the air and looking at what you have left behind on the ground beneath you.

Like most flyers as soon as I board a plane I dart for a window seat and keep my nose pressed against the window all throughout take off until the plane settles above the clouds. I love watching fields becoming quilts of green and brown, trees that look majestic from the ground view turning into mini Lego sculptures, roads and highways becoming spaghetti-ed formations, snow covered villages peacefully resting under the blankets of whiteness, speedboats cutting like scissors through the big blue; all creating canvases and collages of beautiful and unexpected patterns. And when the night falls there is nothing like flying over cities that pulsate with thousands of twinkly lights making them look like space ships or some friendly, alien, otherworldly creatures.

On a much grander, more colourful and detailed scale, Alex MacLean’s aerial photography reminds me of my own photographically unrecorded memories; the photographs I can go to once I am earth bound again. MacLean, whilst studying architecture at Harvard took a course on community planning and that somehow lead him to aerial photography. After he graduated he got a commercial pilot’s license and embarked on his photographic journeys documenting America and the world from his Cesna 182 producing numerous beautiful images that are also intricate studies in design, patterns and shapes. Now one of the world's most renowned aerial photographers he reminds us occasionally airborne Earthlings of the magical view from the way up high.


To see more of Alex MacLean’s work clickHERE