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>> I was born in Bozeman, Montana.
I don't have the stories that everybody has about the whole,
you know, wanting to be an astronaut or wanting
to be involved in science and everything.
I was not good with math and science.
My mother's father was a photographer
and when I was seven years old,
he gave me a Kodak Brownie camera.
It's one of the little ones that you just hold and look down,
click, click, take pictures.
One of the things that I did photograph when I was growing
up was sports because I like the action
and trying to stop the action.
A lot of what we do here is very similar to that.
It's trying to stop the action, whether it's the airplanes,
or the tests they're doing, or things like that.
My name is Jim Ross and I'm the photo lead here
at Armstrong Flight Research Center.
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To be a photographer in Montana, there's not a lot of options
because it's such a small, rural area.
I really don't miss the snow up there.
That was one of the reasons I told my parents
when I left I was going to find an area
that was the hottest I could possibly find,
which is probably pretty close to what I found down here.
Long story short, I was hired as junior photographer
at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, which was the predecessr
to Armstrong Flight Research Center.
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The photography that we do here
at NASA Armstrong is a wide range of different things.
We cover anywhere from public outreach, to educational events,
to personnel situations on up into adjustment
of instrumentation in aircraft, or the aircraft themselves,
documented for the project to use
for various different situations.
Anytime they modify an aircraft,
we are usually called before the modification, we'll go in
and shoot the aircraft.
We'll go shoot the configuration of what it currently is
and then they will make changes; put the instruments in
or put the switches in, or whatever they need
to make the adjustments.
And then we'll go in and shoot the after.
And they keep all that as data for them to be able
to know what different configurations they've had.
And if they have to tuck things way back far in a bay,
they know what's in there so that they don't have
to open everything up and take things
out to see what's in there.
On the ground, often times,
we'll shoot the fixture before it flies and then do, like,
a 360, shots all the way around.
Then when they go fly at Mach 2, they come back
and then we shoot it again and they compare the before
and after to make sure that they didn't do something
to the fixture while they were flying at the high speeds.
We'll do takeoffs, landings, aerials --
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We also go on deployments where we will do science missions
and document inside while they're doing their
science work.
Here, when we shoot, especially in the aircraft,
we do a lot of data collection for the project.
They will often times, like, put tufts or put some kind of grease
or something on the aircraft and then they'll look at the flow
of the air on the aircraft.
So we'll end up shooting pictures
of the different configurations that they'll have
on the aircraft and those pictures will be used
by the engineers.
Anything that pretty much happens here photographically
at Armstrong, we cover in one way, shape, or form.
When I first started out, we did everything by hand.
We would take the pictures, process the film,
make the proof sheets.
So we eventually transitioned to the digital world,
which in a lot of cases made things easier.
I remember when I first started and being nervous
about whether I got the image or not,
so I would take my pictures, run back here, process it real quick
and look at it to make sure I got what I was supposed to.
Nowadays with digital you just look at the image
through the back of the camera and it shows
that you got the image or you didn't,
or you can make adjustments right real-time.
If you did something wrong,
you can adjust your lighting and get it better.
With film, you just had to shoot several different shots and hope
that one of those was getting you what you were wanting
out of the situation.
Within two years being on the job, I was asked if I wanted
to fly and I was very hesitant about it
because I do get pretty strong motion sickness.
But I said I would go ahead and give it a try.
And I flew in a T-38 and flew for about an hour
and got sick about four times.
So I decided that I was not going
to be an aerial photographer and said
thanks but no thanks.
It just wasn't going to work.
And the pilots and some of the engineers, Marta Bohn-Meyer
in particular, she called me to her office.
And I went up to her office and she talked to me
about the whole flying and said
that she heard that I had a flight.
And I said, "Yeah."
And she goes, "Tell me about it."
And I said, "Well, it didn't go well."
And she says, "Well, what does it mean, it didn't go well?'
And I said, "I got sick a lot."
And she said, "Well, what's a lot?"
And I said, "I got sick four times."
And I could tell that she wanted to react to that, but she kind
of held it together and was kind of thinking about it.
And she had her engineering hat on that she always had on.
And, so, she was thinking about, "Well, how long does it take
for you to recover every time you get sick?"
And I said, "Well, it takes, like, a minute or so."
And she goes, "Well, our average test flight is, like,
60 minutes, so that's, 56 minutes you can take pictures.
So I don't see a problem there.
We're good to go."
And about two months later, I tried another flight
and it went better, as they said it would, but I still got sick.
And eventually, as time went on, I went ahead and decided
that I would commit to flying.
And I've got about 800 hours
in about 12 different types of aircraft now.
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When flying in high performance aircraft,
it's your own little world once you get in there.
You learn through the years of how to deal with taking pictures
with the helmet on, with the mask on,
with all the different gear, the gloves.
It's not that easy at first.
You have to try to frame
up without having the camera all the way to your face
because of the helmet and the mask.
As time went on, you start to anticipate what's going
to happen with the maneuvers the pilots are doing.
I would miss some of the stuff in the beginning,
not knowing that they were going
to do this maneuver or that maneuver.
But now after doing it for 24 years, you can figure
out that they're about to do an over-the-top, or they're going
to do a hard right, or a hard left and get the camera ready,
or get the body position ready.
We can do up to, like, normally 6 Gs when we do the flying
and that makes the camera weigh, you know,
roughly about 60 pounds.
So that's another thing that we have to get ready for if we know
that we're going to do a high G maneuver, we have to figure
out how to brace the camera.
And if you're not set up on the body position,
sometimes you can get yourself in a bad position
where you get yourself hurt.
So it's a lot of anticipation.
We're not allowed to have any kind of pods or restraints
or anything in the aircraft because if we have to eject,
they want us to make sure that we don't keep ourselves
from being able to get out of the airplane.
So all you can do is handheld photography
and sometimes that's a challenge.
There are a lot of different things that can cause problems
in the aircraft when we're flying.
People think that it's just, take the camera,
point it out the window, and take pictures.
But a lot of the things --
the different canopies cause problems.
An F-18 is a lot more user friendly than the F-15.
We get a lot more canopy reflections
from the inside of the aircraft.
So we have to work around those reflections.
We also have to deal with different speeds.
If we're doing something high speed,
like when we were doing the ejection seat testing,
we were taking pictures of them shooting a mannequin
out of an F-4 and the issues that we had
with that was it all happened within about two seconds,
but we were shooting the camera at roughly nine frames a second,
so we had about four seconds worth to take pictures with.
You would miss the event if you were too late.
If you went too early, you would run
out of film before you had a chance
to even take your pictures, so that was a problem.
So those are things that we always have
to take into account.
We also have issues shooting through the canopy.
We found that we can't shoot with much more
than 120-millimeter lens or we start getting some kind
of a crystallization effect
or a halo effect around the airplanes.
So that limits on how much we can shoot with the lens.
A lot of people ask questions
about whether we Photoshop the images or not.
Since we're government and since we're tied into NASA,
we're not allowed to Photoshop images per se.
We can adjust the lighting and the color and things like that,
but we can't go in and make changes to the images
since we are a government entity because of the fact
that we're here to document the work that NASA does,
so we're here to make sure that what we document is factual
and not something where we went and manipulated something.
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We're often asked whether or not we feel like the change
in digital photography, where it's become more
and more accessible
to the regular person is a problem for us in our job.
That was something that I worried
about when people started to get phones with pictures
or camera capabilities.
Everyone pretty much had a camera everywhere they went
to document.
And it was a concern of ours.
But we found so far that it hasn't really changed our
industry much.
People still use us.
They still value our skills and our background
for the photography that we do.
One of the main reasons that we are still here doing it,
is because of the fact that we do take the pictures,
we archive the pictures, we have access to the pictures,
we know what we need to shoot, we know how to shoot it,
we know how to light it.
We know the different things that are required
when we get them back, whether they're sensitive,
whether they're not, how to keep sensitive photography
versus the average person going out,
taking pictures, getting an F-35 in the shot
and causing all kinds of chaos here at the base.
>> So he'll come up and then he'll meet with the ground guys
and then he does walk around the airplane, so we'll usually kind
of photograph him as he does his walk around and then...
>> We often have interns that come in during the summer
that work with us to hone their skills.
And they seem to enjoy working out here.
It seems like there are still a lot
of younger people interested in photography.
A lot of what we teach the kids is all
of the different techniques that we have to do,
whether it's shooting a portrait or a passport,
or doing something out on the flight line with the airplanes,
or shooting a retirement, or shooting a colloquium.
It's all something that we need to know.
It's not that we're specialized in one particular thing.
We have to kind of know a lot about all different kinds
of lighting issues, where the hangars are all different
colors, or the different time of day, things like that.
So I think that it's good for the young people to come out
and work with us, because they do learn a lot
about many different types of photography rather
than being specialized in advertising, or portrait,
or studio, or something like that.
I guess, probably, my coolest experience flying here
at NASA Armstrong, or just working in general, but happened
to be a flight situation, was when we worked
on ferrying Endeavor from here, basically Armstrong, to LAX.
We also had about 30 landmarks that we had
to photograph in-flight.
And that was very difficult to stay on target to get each
and every one because even though LA is kind of wide
and spread out, when you're at low levels the speeds
that you travel, you hit, like, one after another.
And a lot of those you would think from the ground are easy
to see, but they are not very easy to see from the air.
Disneyland seems like a large area from the ground,
but in flight, you're over and past it in a couple of seconds.
One of the things that I really love about the job as well is
that we get to be exposed to everything that happens here,
whether it's, you know, working on the budget with finance,
whether it's working on small business,
or whether it's the engineers
and the programs or the projects.
We don't just do one thing.
We get to be doing everything that works here at the Center.
And that's always been really intriguing to me
to know how the whole operation works.