With today’s technology, shooting photos from the air is simple. Send up a drone, and you’re good to go. When drones can’t keep up, there are other methods. Attaching remote control cameras to planes and helicopters has been possible for a while. 40 years ago, though, in 1977, the world was still on film. If you couldn’t see through the viewfinder, you were essentially shooting blind.

There are a great many challenges to getting shots like this with no remote control and no view of what you’re shooting. Photographer Richard Cooke took these challenges to the extreme to photograph the Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows display team. Now he’s telling the tale of how these images came to be, and the techniques involved to create them.

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