(Photo courtesy of Michael Kelley)
“I had no intention of it being this crazy thing,” says Kelley about his image, which went viral after he posted it Monday on Reddit’s aviation subcategory. “It just got shared over and over.” The image is a compilation of 75 different pictures that Kelley made during the course of a eight-hour shoot on Sunday, March 31. He didn’t include every single plane that he took pictures of taking off, omitting some kinds of planes that showed up over and over again. The image represents take offs from two different runways at LAX. “I was up until four in the morning on Sunday night and then woke up on Monday morning and continued to work on it,” says Kelley, spending about eight hours total in post processing. “The final image was 75 layers in Photoshop… so it was pretty significant in terms of staring at the screen with the pen tool.” He’s still not quite sure why the image went viral. “It makes people happy, it’s colorful… it’s interesting,” ponders Kelly. “It’s a pretty simple thing to digest.” For all the complexity of the process, the picture clearly and simply tells the story of a day on the runway. Michael Kelley is a Los Angeles based photographer specializing in architecture. Prints of this image and others are available here.
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