Shooting the impossible! Two of South Africa’s aerobatics greats, Nigel Hopkins and Jason Beamish, and arguably our most accomplished specialist air-to-air aviation photographer Justin de Reuck, took to the air on a warm winter’s day on the highveld, to create a bit of visual magic.

Justin says the aim was to capture the manoeuvre that Jason and Nigel do in their Iveco Extra 330s at an airshow, where they fly down the runway ‘knife-edging’. Justin was in a Harvard with Arnie Meneghelli at the stick, and got Jason and Nigel to carry out the ‘knife-edge’ near to their aircraft.

“We let them fall a little further back and I leaned out of the aircraft a little more, to shoot back but then also used a longer focal lens”, says Justin. With these shots he used a 105mm lens, which he says compresses the image a little bit to give that dramatic visual effect. “That was the idea that I had and thanks to Jason and Nigel we actually could pull it off.”

“Pull it off” is an understatement, as an air-to-air aviation photograph, this ranks as the best you’ll ever see.