MY BIG STUPID YEAR

[Joe Copalman]

580 AIRCRAFT IN 365 DAYS

In late 2013, I decided to try and see how many different aircraft types and variants I could photograph in a calendar year.  This is the result of that.  I photographed 590 different type/model/series of aircraft in 2014, with 580 of those presented in this image (I lost several in a hard drive crash this summer).  

While this started out as a fun project, it felt more and more like work as the year went on, with me making stupid trips all the way across town just to photograph a single aircraft in marginal light simply because I hadn't shot that type yet in 2014.  

I'm glad to have this ridiculous project behind me and am looking forward to shooting only what I want to shoot in the conditions I want to shoot in, with the focus being on quality, not quantity.  

Special thanks to AzAPers Chris Kennedy and Scott Colbath for their help in getting some of these - the road trip to California with Scott was particularly awesome.  

[Joe Copalman]

And the full-sized image. 

[Tower Guy]

 Congratulations Joe, that was a lot of work, fine job! Hope it was worth it. 

[Anna M. Wood]

Fantastic work Joe....  I am very much impressed.  There is a ton of aviation being committed in all those images.   

[Joe Copalman]

Thanks, Harvey!

The worst part was the other night when I was finishing up the big grid image and realized I was two short in the final row.  I went back through and realized that the C-12F and F-16D had been left out, so I had to go back, insert the omitted images, and then shift everything by copying and pasting.  I did a big write-up on it as well and will probably put it up on the AzAP blog if we get that up and running again.

Really looking forward to 2015 and not compulsively checking Flightaware for every airport within a 50-mile radius multiple times a day to see if anything I didn't have yet was inbound or outbound.

[Joe Copalman]

Fantastic work Joe....  I am very much impressed.  There is a ton of aviation being committed in all those images.   

Thanks Anna!  It's actually pretty amazing how many different aircraft types are still active in the United States, especially in the southwest.  What's funny is that an LAX trip would have only yielded a half-dozen or so types that I didn't already have. 

The best part of all this was all the surprises throughout the year, like the Kfir at Willie or the Transall at Coolidge or the Spartan Executive at Copperstate.  I had a list of aircraft I could reasonably expect to catch in AZ, and so many in this image were not on it.  What surprises me the most is the aircraft that'd be obvious that aren't on here - Taiwanese F-16Bs from Luke, Dutch F-16AMs from Tucson, NASA T-38Ns at Willie.  I just couldn't seem to make those happen.  I even took a day off a few weeks back to head to Luke to catch the RoCAF two-seaters and when I asked Harvey if he knew if they'd be flying, he said they were deploying the day prior to some other base for training. 

[Matt Ottosen]

Wow, congratulations, that looks like it was a lot of work.  Super jealous of the C-5 and E-2, both are way up there on my white whale list (right under the f'ing Hind)!

[scottcolbath]

Nicely done Joe. You should see about getting a Fathead wall decal made from that.

http://www.fathead.com/custom/

S.C.

[Jeff D. Welker]

Congrats brother on achieving this goal. Hopefully a series of shock treatments and psychotropic medications will have you back to normal in no time 

[Scott Youmans]

Looks much more impressive on my "real" computer than on my iPhone!  Nice work and lots of it.  Well done.

[Dave S.]

Wow Joe, quite the impressive accomplishment!  Well deserved accolades on the idea, follow through and final (double?) execution!

[Mike Margolis]

Wow!! That there shows commitment!

[Joe Copalman]

Wow, congratulations, that looks like it was a lot of work.  Super jealous of the C-5 and E-2, both are way up there on my white whale list (right under the f'ing Hind)!

Thanks, Matt!  It was a lot of work - almost too much, but I'm still glad I did it just to do it. 

The C-5 was a random arrival at D-M during Hawgsmoke, and the E-2 I caught over La Jolla when I was at the Children's Pool with my family the Friday of the El Centro airshow.  I lost that E-2 shot in the hard-drive crash, so replaced it with an old one from Willie. 

The Hind was kind of a disappointment.  I found the perfect spot to catch it returning to Yuma and missed a lot of cool stuff recovering on the 21s, like a Prowler making an arrested landing.  The Hind came from farther south than the other helos returning from the east that morning, so I wound up with a belly shot.  One of those "got it but pissed off about it" shots. 

[wingsnstuff]

Excellent work Joe.  I don't know how you did this, but the end results are impressive.  I'm sure that selecting your favorites was a challenge in itself.  Well done!