TODAY producer Zoe Marcus interviewed photographer Ian Martens. TODAY viewers named his picture of pilot Capt. Brian Bews ejecting from his CF-18 fighter jet, which crashed into the ground minutes later, the photo of 2010.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economyWhat happened the day you took that photo?The airshow was starting the next day. It was a weekend airshow. It starts on a Saturday, so this was the Friday before. Most of the acts have arrived in town and they do practice runs that day. There's also usually a media preview where we get to go up with one of the acts. We'll get to ride along in a plane or something like that.At what point did you realize something was wrong?He had made a few passes across the audience viewing area. Everything seemed to be fine. It's a pretty neat plane , so I was thinking it would make a pretty good picture, even under normal circumstances. So I was tracking him across as he was making a pass and he was doing what they call a high alpha pass where the nose is kind of pointed 45 degrees angle up and the thrusters are going full force, really low and slow passing in front of where the audience would be. And so I'm taking pictures, of this, thinking it'll be a neat maneuver, it'll be a good visual. I'm tracking him as he goes in front. And all of a sudden I'd noticed the one wing tip kind of dipped a little bit. I've seen this maneuver before and I thought, well that didn't seem right, because they're so low to the ground, you gotta to be going full throttle to stay up. To see the wing dip a little bit, I kind of thought this is not normal. And in a split second, I saw a couple of pops, a couple of bright flashes within the plane. After reviewing my pictures, I think what I was seeing was the little thruster jets that sent his ejection seat out of the plane. And from there the plane just made this, what seemed to me to be this slow bank and knifed straight into the ground. It was so surreal to see. It was very dreamlike for me to watch it because it was kind of like, am I actually seeing this. It's unbelievable.So basically from there, I was so focused on the plane, I don't remember seeing pilot coming out of the cockpit, I don't remember seeing his parachute in the air during this whole sequence. The plane went into the ground. A huge, big ball of orange flamesAs soon as that ended, and this whole time I just have my finger on the shutter, I must've been in shock or something like that, I don't remember panicking or anything. I was very calm. I knew I had been taking pictures for the whole sequence. And then I thought, oh man, I hope there's not a pilot in the middle of all that flame. I took my camera down from my eye and I saw his parachute gliding off to the side, and I thought, oh thank you, that this guy's not in the middle of all this wreckage.You knew you'd gotten the picture of the plane going down, but you didn't know that you had captured the pilot ejecting?I didn't review my pictures until kind of a few minutes afterwards, because immediately after that happened, I run to the fence, I start taking pictures of burning wreckage on the ground. I'm watching to see what's happening with the pilot as his parachute's kind of dragging him across the ground. After I stopped and reviewed the pictures on the back of my camera, I see that in most of the frames I have the pilot hovering above all this, what's happening with the plane. And I mean especially the one of him immediately ejecting out of the plane, I had no idea that I had that shot because of course the moment my shutter opens, my viewfinder goes black and so that's not something that I saw. As the camera capturing it, I'm not actually seeing it. So I had no idea I'd captured that image and that was quite a surprise to see.Were you surprised at the reaction to this image and the accident?The whole spectacle of a jetfighter crashing is...I knew that there would be a lot of interest in it. It was surprising to see how quickly the news got out. I had people calling me saying, 'do you know plane crashed at the airport?' I'm telling them 'yeah, I'm here, I saw it, I photographed it.' Immediately within a half an hour, an hour, I'm starting to get phone calls from radio stations wanting to hear a firsthand account. It was a pretty intense afternoon after all that happened.You are a photographer at a small paper in Canada. This paper has gone all over the world; it's ended up on several 'best of' lists. It's been named the TODAY/msnbc.com's most memorable image of 2010. What has this experience been like for you?We belong to a news cooperative in Canada that is also part of the Associated Press so there is the occasional photo that we make, usually not something of a huge serious nature, that gains some exposure nationally or internationally. This one in particular, it's really humbling because I see all these major events that happened this year and all these really important pictures and really important news items and to see that my photo has gained this kind of attention and is sharing company with some really amazing work and really important stories, it's pretty humbling to think that it's gotten that kind of a response.