Influence Artists One Year Anniversary - Part 1 (The Presentation At Tomorrow's Aeronautical Museum)

Thanks for checkin' out the Bsombin' blog! Last November I went to an Influence Artists x Los Angeles Grammers photo meet at Tomorrow's Aeronautical Museum. TAM opened it's doors for photographers, models, and car enthusiasts to gather and collaborate in the name of art. Robin Petgrave (the man in charge at TAM and the owner of Celebrity Helicopters) was also generous enough to give helicopter riders over DTLA for a discounted rate. Despite my fear of heights, I couldn't pass up the chance to take a helicopter ride over DTLA with my camera! Needless to say, it was the best photo meet I had ever been to!

A few weeks ago Influence Artists x Los Angeles Grammers had another meet at TAM. And, once again, Mr. Petgrave was offering discounted flights over DTLA in his helicopter! And this time they also had Jon SooHoo (The LA Dodgers' official photographer for over 30 years) as a guest speaker! Thanks to the wonderful LA traffic, I was late and missed the first half of Mr. SooHoo's presentation. But, I was able to enjoy some of the slide shows he presented and got to hear him speak about some of his experiences with the Dodgers' organization. He also shared some advice about working as a professional photographer and talked about subjects like gear, shooting with film vs. digital, and how he stays creative after 30+ years working as a photographer.

Once Mr. SooHoo was done with his presentation, I headed outside to see what was going on with the helicopter rides... Mr. Petgrave was still out flying. So I decided to go get some pictures of the other helicopters that were parked at the museum. I forgot that Mr. Petgrave had recently come into possession of one of my childhood obsessions... Earlier this year he added one of the original Airwolf helicopters (from the '80's TV series) to his collection of helicopters! I remember watching that show every Saturday night as a little kid. Sundays I would go outside and ride my bike around the neighborhood and pretend I was flying in Airwolf and taking out the bad guys. I geeked out pretty hard (and went on a total nostalgia trip) when I saw her parked outside of the hanger. So I started get some pics of Airwolf and all the other choppers, the planes, and the cars while I was waiting...