-continued CA: Do you have any depth-of-field concerns? PM: I shoot shutter priority, and whatever the camera decides is going to be the depth-of-field, that's what it is. I'm not in control of that. Depth of field is not a factor for me; shutter speed is. CA: I can remember from my NASA days that reflections were always a problem when shooting through canopies. How do you deal with that problem? PM: I try not to shoot through canopies. If I am in the tail of a B-25, shooting through Plexiglas, I try to wear dark clothes to avoid reflections, but that's not normally a problem for me; 97% of the time, the canopy's open. CA: How far have you ranged world-wide in pursuit of vintage aircraft? PM: Well, I've gotten to New Zealand, that's been spectacular, also Australia, and I go to England every year. England has really become a second home for me in this work, because of Duxford and the people that fly at Duxford, Stephen Grey, and the Hannas, brilliant, brilliant pilots. Also because Duxford is part of the British museum system called the IWM (Imperial War Museum) that has an extraordinary archive in London that I lean very heavily on for my work. Of the sixty-six black-and-whites that are in the book, thirty-eight came from London, the IWM. So England has been very important, because of the ghosts. It's true ground for WW II aviation it's where it happened. . However, the whole thing began for me in south Texas. My aviation photography grew out of Texas. Even today, I know the Texas people and airplanes better than I know the California people and airplanes. CA: What percentage of the planes you shoot are owned by individual hobbyists as opposed to collections? PM: In truth, most of the collections are individual hobbyists; a wealthy individual, with a lot of energy, who has created a collection and a tax shelter by making it into a museum. There are several of those individuals around that have vast collections, twenty, thirty extraordinary airplanes that they fly all the time. So, maybe eighty percent of the planes that I photograph fall under the umbrella of a collection or museum. The other twenty percent are guys that own one or two airplanes. CA: What are some of the best collections and air shows around the country for vintage plane buffs in the U.S.? PM: The Confederate Air Force Flying Museum is the biggest, oldest WW II airplane collection. It was created in 1957 by some crop dusters in south Texas, and has grown to be an international organization. Their annual "Airsho" (in October), held at their headquarters in Midland, is a wonderful show. The Ellington "Wings Over Houston" air show is one of the great air shows in the U.S. And the Breckenridge air show in west Texas is a great traditional air show (Memorial Day weekend; also see Breckenridge Aviation Museum) that every year attracts all sorts of private people that gather there to have a fine ol' time dropping sacks of

flour into the other guys' hangars; they make B-25 bomb runs, open the (bomb bay) doors and try to skip-bomb sacks of flour into the middle of your barbeque. CA: This occupation has obviously kept you busy. How much time do you spend on the road and in the air? PM: I go to about ten air shows a year. Out of twelve months, I'm away two. As for how much time I spend in the air, of those two months, I spend very little time in the air. Most of it is spent waiting and preparing for an event. But the flying and the actual photography takes place very fast, very violently, and it's gone. Four orbits to shoot one plane is normally what I do, which takes about eight minutes. I just shoot as fast as I can while it's happening. CA: Now that you have eighteen of your GHOSTS calendars and three books under your belt, are there more unique aircraft around the world to track down and photograph? PM: Yes, there are more airplanes all the time. When I began, there was only one Spitfire; this last year there were thirty-eight Spitfires flying. At Duxford there were fourteen Spitfires in a row on the flightline for the air show, and they all flew in a tremendous tail-chase. It was just an amazing thing to see. . So there are more planes coming all the time. There are more coming (being discovered and restored) than are being destroyed, at least at this period of development in WW II aviation. There are some great planes coming out of caves in Russia, and being dredged out of Lake Michigan, just coming from everywhere. People are also starting to build full-scale model airplanes of planes we'll never see again. Of course they're not real WW II airplanes, but they're exact, 100% replicas, and they're exciting to see. CA: Are there any major new projects in the works? PM: There's the CD ROM we're working on. That's a terrific format, because it can gather so much more information than a book. In the book and the calendars the audience sees just one image, but in that image there is a range of images that imply flight and show many aspects of what that airplane is, and what those moments were like as we circled the plane. We'll see a range of black-and-white archival stuff that the books just can't hold. The CD will be a terrific vehicle because it can contain the actual sounds; Winston Churchill is speaking himself, and that's an incredibly powerful thing to hear, to hear Hitler say those words. It's better than the printed page. The music will be done by Blue Gene Tyranny, who is an extraordinary composer. So the emotional level of the CD is potentially much higher than that of the book. It's the emotional impact that I'm really trying to get to. [Ed. note: Phil Makanna showed parts of the CD in prototype form at a VISCOMM multimedia seminar at which he was a co-speaker. Having seen it, I certainly agree with his assessment of its potential.] . I'm still trying to recover from this last book, it was exhausting, but there will be another GHOSTS book. The subject is so huge, so rich with human emotion, that I'll work all my life and never do justice to the subject. *****