No matter how long you or I dedicate ourselves to photography, nor how many amazing pictures we take or state-of-the-art cameras we own, none of us will ever come remotely close to being as cool as NASA career photographer Jim Ross.
On July 04, to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the USA (in 1776), Ross took to the skies in an F-18 fighter jet, snapping bird's-eye pictures of Washington, DC. Taking part in the Freedom 250 Flyover, Ross, with a Nikon Z9 in hand, also captured frames of an accompanying F-15 fighter.
“I grew up in Bozeman, Montana, when it was still considered a small town, so if someone told that little kid that he would be flying in an F-18 over the National Mall, he would have never believed it,” Ross told NASA.
Jim Ross started his career as an aviation photographer at NASA’s Armstrong (then Dryden) Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in 1989, becoming the photo lead in 1997, a position he still holds.
Throughout his impressive career spanning almost 40 years, he’s immortalized some of NASA’s most electrifying moments – like early SR-71 flights, the delivery flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour to Los Angeles and the first flights of NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft.
In 2023, from the backseat of a T-34C research aircraft, Ross shot an exhilarating frame of NASA pilot Nils Larson while the plane was inverted during an aerobatic maneuver. The image captivated the agency and was later awarded NASA Photo of the Year.
“My mind is always thinking about what kind of photo I can take that will share what I am experiencing in the aircraft,” Ross said. “I love documenting history, and having the opportunity to capture flights and launches has kept me doing it for almost 37 years.”
Well, that’s it folks; we may as well sell our cameras, because Jim Ross has reached stratospheric levels of coolness that only a NASA photographer ever could. I’m not jealous at all. I swear.
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