Star Spangled D C 3 Art Print

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This was the first airplane I ever photographed, at least in a serious fashion. It was in the spring of 1978 during the final weeks of my senior year in high school, and my mother had recently given me my first SLR, an Olympus OM-1, as an early graduation present.

I was attending a boarding school in the mountains of Lake County in California. Our school cook, Chick, was also a seasoned pilot, and one Spring afternoon he took me and my buddy John flying out of Lakeport. We had hoped to fly over the campus and get some aerial photos, but it was a bit stormy that day and the ceiling was too low to safely fly over the mountains. So instead we just flew over Clear Lake. The flight was rather bouncy, and after one go-around I'd had enough, as had the cook's wife, so we got out and let Chick and John go around a few more times without us.

A pair of DC-3s were parked at the edge of the field, so I took my c...

In the fall of 1959, Mr. Toy entered this world at a place called Carmel on California's Monterey Peninsula. Nine years later his family pulled up stakes for the rain-soaked city of Salem, Oregon where he never quite fit in. When he was 12, he and his mother viewed an exhibit of photographs by a Salem newspaper photographer, which inspired him to take his first photography class. During his teenage years he gradually developed his eye for composition and his skills with light and exposure. Though he did not pursue photography as a career, he has continued to document his observations of the world on small frames of film. In 1984, Mr. Toy and his wife Heidi returned to the Monterey Peninsula where his heart belonged. In 1997, on a bit of...