NAV CANADA Explore Aviation Summer Camp

You may have seen NAV CANADA in the news over the last few days. They are the company that employ all of our nation’s air traffic controllers - the same folks who have been sending their American counterparts pizza 🍕 while the US government shutdown continues. After I spent some time with them on this shoot, I’m not surprised to hear about this act of kindness!

Last summer I was commissioned by NAV CANADA to capture their first Explore Aviation Summer Camp. 30 girls from across the country had an all-expenses-paid, hands-on learning experience about careers in aviation such as an air traffic controller, flight service specialist, electronics technologist, and engineer.

This was one of my favourite shoots of 2018. I’ve been dying to shoot more projects related to the STEM fields, and this particular one aiming to encourage kids, specifically girls, to consider a career in aviation was right up my alley. 

We had amazing access to the air traffic control tower of the Ottawa International Airport, where the girls got to watch the controllers do their thing in real time. They were incredibly gracious, chatting with the girls about what they do and answering any questions they had. They even asked one of the NAV CANADA pilots do a few loops around the tower just for the camp, so they could take a good look at one of the aircrafts in action.

The participants also had many other exciting and valuable experiences. They had a tour of a few planes to check out their technology, learned about how navigational systems operate with satellites, and they even built - from scratch - a device that receives tracking signals from nearby airplanes. They took them up to the roof to test them out, where they were ecstatic to see their electronic skills pay off as the planes’ signals appeared on the digital map when they entered local airspace. They were even able to point out the area of the sky where the planes would be appearing a few minutes later. And be spot on, by the way.

Technical Information: I shot this alone (ie. no assistants, no tethering, no strobes) using mostly available light, and sometimes a little flash from a Nikon SB-910. I approached the shoot this way in order to keep up with the fast paced camp, and capture the candid documentary style images that NAV CANADA was after.

I had both a Nikon D850 and D800 strapped to me at all times, constantly swapping which camera I was shooting with depending on the situation and focal length I needed. I used the Sigma 35mm 1.4 and 85mm 1.4 lenses, as well as the Nikon 24-70mm 2.8 when I needed to get wider.

Check out the rest of the images in the gallery on my website!