Patagonia, Chile

Nothing Jim had flown before Patagonia taught him anything useful about Patagonia. Near Torres del Paine the wind doesn't gust so much as arrive — a wall of air that can go from calm to unflyable in under a minute, funneled and accelerated by the towers themselves. He lost a propeller guard and nearly lost an aircraft on his second day figuring that out.

The rhythm of the shoot ended up being almost entirely about waiting. Jim would set up at first light, run the pre-flight checks, and then just watch the anemometer for hours at a time, some days never unpacking the drone at all. The flyable windows, when they came, rarely lasted more than twenty minutes before the wind slammed back in.

But when it clears — even briefly — the light off the glaciers and the granite towers is unlike anything else in the gallery. Cold, blue-white, and absolutely still for just long enough to get the shot. Every image in this set exists because of one of those short windows.