Postcards from the sky

Published 4:00 pm Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Lu Lawrence reissues her classic aerial portraits.

For someone who’s spent so much time in the air, Lu Lawrence is remarkably grounded.

As an aerial photographer Lawrence had her head in the clouds, but the recent reprinting of her signature book, “A Bird’s Eye View of Island Bainbridge,” also marks a lifetime of steady accomplishment.

“One thing led to another,” Lawrence said of her career in the sky. “I’m happy with what I’ve done.”

After graduating from California State University at Fullerton in the early 1960s, Lawrence began training Western airline flight attendants at the company’s training center and accompanying them on flights to check skills.

One of those training flights took her over Bainbridge, the island that would become a prime photographic subject.

“I remember, I had finished my report for the day and I was up in First Class with just one or two people,” she said. “As we flew over the island I remember saying, out loud, ‘I’m going to move here some day.’ And that was that.”

But it would be a few years before Lawrence would come to Bainbridge.

Cypress College had recruited her from the airlines to develop a flight attendants’ training program for their Cypress, Calif. campus – a start-up Lawrence parlayed into the largest airline training program in the United States.

Still, in at least one sense, Lawrence had already embarked on a visual arts career; she was creating images through her use of video equipment for training – at that time a cutting-edge technology.

At Cypress, she met her future husband Altus Simpson, an oceanographer and geologist who was a fellow teacher.

The couple purchased property near Manitou Beach and in 1983, five years later, moved there. But it wasn’t until 1987, when Lawrence wanted pictures of the tulip garden the couple had planted, that she picked up a still camera.

Within six months she had sold a photo to a magazine. It wouldn’t be long before she would provide magazine covers for such publications as Waterline and North­west Travel, and have 18 prints of the island published as post cards.

With Simpson, she would eventually embark on yet another career as travel photographer, taking pictures on cruise ships and in more than 100 countries.

But at the start, her learning curve was steep. When a New York advertising firm asked her for clips, she told them “sure,” hung up and asked Simpson, “What are clips?”

She approached another publisher, who suggested aerial views of Seattle’s Seafair. In typical “can do” fashion, Lawrence was soon airborne in a chartered plane from the Bremerton Airport – accompanied by her husband, who handed her film throughout each flight.

By 1989, Lawrence was confident enough to compile images for “A Birdseye View of Island Bainbridge Island.”

As she flew more, she learned to look for days without cloud cover and to shoot in morning or afternoon, when the light is dramatic.

And she would sometimes stick her head through an open window to get her shot.

Lawrence shoots with a Nikon camera and uses 100 ISO Fuji film for the hyper-real color saturation.

“I like what I see with it,” she said. “Magazines all like the Fuji film.”

She doesn’t use a gyro – a mechanism that stabilizes the camera from the vibration of the plane – and so the resolution of her pictures isn’t good enough to allow huge enlargements.

Yet while Lawrence usually takes hundreds of shots to get one usable image on the ground, that doesn’t hold true in the air.

“It’s a funny thing – I can get 36 shots with a roll of 36. I think I’m meant to be an aerial photographer more than anything,” she said.

A year and a half ago, Lawrence was ready to do another book, just waiting for the right weather to shoot fall foliage.

But when the right day came, she learned the plane in which she usually rode had been sold.

That circumstance – and a sense of perhaps having used up her good luck flying – made Lawrence decide to republish her first book, a project supported by local realtor Penny McLaughlin.

The book captures Bainbridge Island as it looked 10 years ago, her portraiture focused on recognizable neighborhoods like Port Madison, Meadowmeer, Yeomalt Point, Rockaway Beach and Winslow, sometimes with the Olympic Mountains or Seattle skyline as backdrop.

Interestingly, Lawrence says that while the island has changed during that time, the aerial views are still largely the same because trees tend to camouflage the new construction.

And some corners of the island seem impervious to change, namely the Country Club at Restoration Point, the subject of one dramatic image.

Apart from occasional speculation as to whether her own ground-school training would be enough to allow her to land a plane should the pilot become incapacitated, Lawrence says she hasn’t been nervous in the air, although she does admit that her focus on photography may be one reason.

During the 15-minute flight from Bremerton Airport toward the island, she has often had a form of “cold feet” that prompts her to wonder, “what are you doing here in this small, dinky plane?’

“But then, when I see the things I want to photograph, it is exciting,” she said. “The big thing that I enjoy is that I can bring back this beauty that the average person doesn’t get to see.”

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From the sky

The newly reprinted “A Bird’s Eye View of Island Bainbridge” by Lu Lawrence is available at Eagle Harbor Book Co.