Aaron Gustafson, a Seattle-based artist, has become the first person to ever shoot large format photographs while skydiving. Using a custom large format helmet camera he designed himself, Gustafson made one large format photograph on each jump while traveling at speeds upwards of 130 miles per hour.

The helmet camera is a cube-shaped acrylic and aluminum box that uses a wide angle lens and contains a single sheet of 4×5” large format film.

Gustafson says,

I wanted to upend the norms by making a [large-format] camera to be used in a wildly different way. This is what you’d get if you threw Ansel Adams out of a plane. […] Photography is in a strange place now where everyone is taking camera-phone snapshots and posting them online. But photography can still be grand and larger-than-life. This project came out of a desire for that. It’s a hybrid of new and old, calm and chaos.

Here’s a video documenting one of his photographic jumps:

To see more of his work, you can visit Gustafson’s website.

(via PhotographyBLOG)