Robin Wright
My obsession with flight began as a child growing up in St. Petersburg,
FL when I would look upwards in the evening to see Sputnik 1, and later
Echo 1, pass overhead. It grew as I watched jets from MacDill AFB in
Tampa fly overhead, occasionally leaving the windows shaking as the
shockwave hit. Next came the space program where I would climb onto
our roof to view the white vapor trail from the Mercury mission launches
above Cape Canaveral 150 miles away. While in college, I drove myself
to the Cape to view several of the Apollo launches, including Apollo 13.
While flight was a passion, I turned to science as a profession.
I received my PhD in inorganic photochemistry from the University of
Southern California in Los Angeles. After graduating, I was offered a job
at Oak Ridge National Labs to study the photochemistry of plutonium
complexes, but I decided to go a safer route and took a summer job
at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo making chemical tags to
study the mechanism of oil migration from bearings in satellites before
departing for a 15-month postdoctoral at the University of Regensburg
in Regensburg, Germany. Upon returning to the US, I accepted a
position at 3M in St. Paul, MN in the Corporate Research Lab where I
eventually became a Corporate Scientist and was inducted into 3Mís
technical Hall of Fame, The Carlton Society, in 2014. After 38+ years at
3M, I retired in April 2017.
As a photographer, I consider myself an advanced amateur. I purchased
my first ìrealî camera, a Minolta XK, while in California. Living in
Santa Monica, I would frequently bike down Sepulveda Blvd.
and photograph inbound 747s as they passed overhead into LAX.
While living in Germany, I toured twelve European countries and have
several thousand slides from those travels. I also collected several
pounds of coins worth several hundred dollars from the different
countries that are worthless today because of the Euro.
I finally went digital with an Olympus E10 and later upgraded to a
Nikon D2X which I still use today. My favorite lenses for aviation photos
are the Nikon DX 18-200mm and the AF-S 70-300mm. Most of my photos
are shot in RAW and while I have used Lightroom, I prefer Photoshop,
although my level of expertise in both is very limited. Hopefully in
retirement, I can significantly improve in that area!
I first learned about ISAP after meeting Larry Grace at the preshow
photoshoot in Duluth, MN in 2017. I was taking a shot of a standing
plane using a polarizer to remove glare off the window and Larry
walked up and suggested for the show that I should remove the
polarizer and put on the lens hood then gave me his card. I didn’t know
much about Larry until the actual show when I saw him on the other
side of the fence getting much closer to the action than I ever could. I
followed up with him after the show, sending him the RAW file of a B-52
that I had taken. He cropped it and adjusted the sky tone to enhance it
then sent it back to me with some info on ISAP. After looking through
some of the issues of the ISAP magazine, I was hooked.My goal as an ISAP member is to meet a number of ISAP members,
improve my photography skills, increase my opportunities to shoot
under different lighting conditions, and master Photoshop. I look
forward to the journey.MEET OUR MEMBER