Rob Holland Retrospective: Part 2

Heading back to March 2015 for this one. Rob had signed with Window World to be sponsors for his 2015 season and he tapped me to handle press and marketing duties. One of my first jobs was to travel with him to Shreveport to get ready for the start of the season, including doing a photoshoot that would provide images for all our marketing materials that year. So of course it rained for several days. And even when the sun came out, it was a hazy, yellowish sun that really didn’t provide the kind of light photographers hope for. But eventually, the ceiling lifted enough to jump aboard Kevin Coleman’s Bonanza and head out to get some shooting done.

We had several “sets” planned, including the famous inverted slide slip over the dark waters of a nearby lake (and we’ll look more closely at that picture in a future post). We also did a sunset shot that Rob always told me was his favorite pic every taken of him (also, to be discussed more in a future post). But the shot I want to focus on here is the one where Rob positioned his MXS-RH an inverted slip above the Bonanza and then slowly brought the plane in as close as he could. It was Blue Angels close, that much more impressive in that he was inverted, slipping sideways, and had a huge prop chopping up the sky in front of him. This was as close as I have ever been to another airplane while airborne and it produced the image below. If anything, the wide angle lens make him seem further away than he actually was. The man was not human.

Unfortunately, we were dropped by Window World at the end of the season and the value of these images dropped significantly. None of us, least of all Rob, was very interested in providing free advertising for a company that decided against sponsoring us., so these images became instant relics. A shame, really, as some of them were amongst my favorite images I ever shot — including this one.