Flying High with Guy Crittenden
You may know Guy Crittenden from his beautifully detailed landscapes and nature paintings that grace the walls of his gallery space at CAC or are presented on the CAC website but you may not know that he is a renowned photographer as well. For 25 years Crittenden was a commercial photographer working with major clients. Now he is revisiting his love for the medium by creating aerial photographs in his new company, Richmond Aerials. “This is contemporary, large scale, high definition aerial photography,” says Crittenden, who creates the pieces from images collected over years along with newer ones.
He started creating the large-scale aerials last summer after shooting some places for aerial paintings. Crittenden says, “I thought, ‘Why am I painting these things when people really like photography?’.” He takes the shots from helicopters, private planes and sometimes uses a drone shooting at various times of day to get different panoramas with atmospheric drama. “The fun for me is the capture,” he explains. “I can take a thousand shots but coming up with the ones that are captivating is the challenging part.” Once the images are collected, he digitally stitches several individual images together via a special software to make one high resolution picture which can be blown up to as large as 24 feet - billboard sized. “When you see them, you will understand what I mean about the detail,” Crittenden says. “You can hardly see any camera grain even at 6 feet wide. This level of detail was not even achievable before!”
Part of Crittenden’s mission with this medium is to document the current landscape with all the large cranes, construction sites, imploded buildings, etcetera included. "You can see so much and learn so much in just one photograph from above,” he says. His idea is that commercial spaces like lobbies of big office buildings, business boardrooms and hotels will want the city represented in this way. When asked about his feelings about the aerials, Crittenden says, “It’s really exciting that I can merge everything that I have done to make something beautiful for Richmond.”
You can see some of Crittenden’s large aerial photographs on display in the front windows at CAC now through November. Find other images at http://richmondaerials.com/.