In keeping with my semi-weekly column of Hear it from the Expert, I am proud to say we have quite the expert here to inspire us today.
Last week I was blessed with the opportunity to sit down and chat with renowned photographer Norman Kent. He allowed me to pick his brain for a couple hours and he enlightened me with some of the incredible stories of his life as a skydiver and photographer.
*NormanKent.com
This interview really only scratches the surface of our discussion, which I’m sure only minutely touches on the life that he’s led, but I wanted to share with everyone some of the amazing things that were shared with me through the eyes of this accomplished individual.
Below is part 1 of the interview with Norman Kent. As I mentioned above, we chatted for quite some time and I wanted to capture as much as I could – after all, it’s not often that opportunities like this one come around!
SDC: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Norman. After having chatted with you briefly at the Work Stinks Boogie this year I remember saying to myself, “I’d love to sit down and pick that guy’s brain some day,” so this is a great opportunity to do that.
NK: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s my pleasure to do this for you.
SDC: So let’s start out with the obvious question, when and how did you get your start in skydiving?
NK: I did my first jump on Aug 24, 1975. It was a static line jump. I think this is a very common story. It was meant to be a birthday gift to myself, and I was going to do it only once. Well, I was offered a 5 jump package for pretty cheap, and I refused. Like anything else the first jump was the most expensive, like two-thirds of the cost, and the other four were fairly inexpensive, but I refused because I figured I was only going to do it once. Then I jumped and it was instant love and I knew it was something I was going to do forever. The first thing I said to my friends when I landed was that I was going to do this for the rest of my life. And that’s how it all started.
SDC: Yeah, that seems to be a pretty typical story. Not many people go into their first jump already saying “this is something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.” It’s a cool feeling when you get back on the ground and all you want is to do it again. So with all the traveling you do, where do you consider to be your home dropzone?
NK: My home dropzone is Earth, that’s the way I look at it. Though technically my home dropzone is Skydive Deland. Because I had seen other DZs going for records and things like that, I realized that I didn’t want to be in one place only and get involved in the politics in that once place. As you stay in one place long enough you see and get involved in the politics of that place. So I thought, every place I go could be a new place and you always see all the good stuff from the outside and experience the awesome place for these short periods of time. I figured that’s sort of the world I wanted to live in, I really get to see all the good things about all the places I jump. That’s not really how I planned it, but that’s sort of how it played itself out, so that’s when I decided that my home dropzone was Earth.
SDC: I’ve noticed you do a lot of freefly photography for world records and stuff, do you consider that your favorite discipline?
NK: No. And let me clarify that.
When I first started skydiving I was already a photographer. I fell in love with photography the same way I fell in love with skydiving, with a specific event that inspired me. With no training and no schooling, I knew what I wanted, and I wanted to communicate the things I saw and experienced in life.
With skydiving, photography really became the priority for me. I always said if I had to choose one for some reason, if someone said to me, “you can’t have so much fun” and I had to choose [between skydiving and photography], I would pick photography.
With that said, my motivation in skydiving is photography. It’s the visual capturing of the sport. I also feel that it’s a sport that I love so much that provides very unique visuals. I feel very blessed to be able to see and capture light the way that I understand it. And I feel in a lot of ways that skydivers and non skydivers alike miss out on it and that’s what my motivation is, to communicate it. Meaning that skydivers are so focused on the jump, the grips, the formation, the skydiving elements of it, even though they’re enjoying and they understand what an amazing thing they’re doing, which is part of the turn on of it, they’re really missing out on how we look as far as people playing in the playground, Earth.
The second element is that the non-skydiver doesn’t really get to understand that unless they skydive, and then again they only get to understand it from a skydivers point of view. So to me the motivation is to show the world of skydiving to a non-skydiving audience in the form of beauty which they can understand – rather than in the form of “how many points did we have,” well they don’t really care, but they just want to look at it as “wow that’s amazing, that’s a lot of people, and wow look at the clouds, and wow where were you?” and that’s what they care about.
Because of that, I want to shoot everything in the sport - freeflying just happens to be one of the dynamic new elements of the sport, and it actually represents a problem for me in the sense that the sport has diversified and branched off in so many directions that it’s hard for me to keep up with all of it and that’s one of the biggest challenges for me. If I want to shoot all of it as far as the sport is concerned, then I need to do a little bit of all of it, and freefly is one of the most challenging things so I spend a little bit more time doing that. In fact I’m constantly training the in tunnels in order to get better and stay with the dynamics of the sport.
So yes, I do a lot of freefly because it is very dynamic and it’s challenging and I love it, but I love it just as much as any other part of the sport. I just spend more time doing it because I find belly flying really easy. I’ve done it for many years and also, physically speaking, it’s so much easier to do that I don’t need to spend so much time doing it and I can pick it up right away, even if I haven’t done it for a little bit. And the reason is because of the physics of it…for instance, in freeflying, you’re leading with your head, so any kind of head movement to point the camera in a different direction for composition, results in a change in direction in flight, or you must alter your body position drastically to continue your same direction. This is more of a challenge, and you’re also dealing with faster speeds and consequently a higher degree of difficulty and of risk. So that’s one of the reasons I spend more of my time freeflying. I love all of those challenges from that, so you could say it is one of my favorites. But really, a lot of the reasons why I do that is motivated by the photography. I want to do whatever it takes to not let freeflying pull away to where I can’t participate in the state of the art, cutting edge things that are happening like records and things like that.
SDC: That’s great! I was actually going to ask next which came first, skydiving or photography and you beat me to that. Tell us a little about how the two merged…
NK: Photography happened for me the same way skydiving did. I found myself in a situation where I said, “wow, this is what I want to do,” and I was a photographer instantly. It took a long time to really make it pay off in terms of money and all that, but the passion was there and I wasn’t turning back. Then of course when skydiving happened, it was a similar thing.
So there was this passion for shooting and passion for skydiving and I couldn’t wait to merge the two. I remember I wanted to jump a helmet with my static line jumps, and of course they wouldn’t let me. My first [camera] jump was jump 23, and with static line I didn’t have much freefall under my belt, but I was in a hurry because all I could think of was shooting this wonderful world. And that’s how it all started as far as putting the two of them together.
SDC: Who has inspired you as a skydiver?
NK: I’d have to say that I don’t have a specific person who acted as a mentor to me so much as I’m inspired by a specific type of person: anyone that’s willing to go the distance and go all out for their feelings and become a champion on a project or record. These people aren’t necessarily ego oriented, but are in search of a dream. Of course, I look up to the pioneers in the sport – some of those whose names have gotten left behind in the sport, but people who have helped make it what it is today.
I do have my mentors and the people that made a huge difference for me in photography, but in skydiving it’s almost like I had so much support and I had so many experiences with so many cool people that it’s almost a breed of people [rather than specific mentors].
SDC: We talked a little about your experience with freefly, but tell us, what have your experiences been with other disciplines like wingsuiting.
NK: As I said before, I’m interested in every part of the sport. But I should define what really has worked for me and what hasn’t. Anything that has to do with regular belly flying, whether it’s competitions or large formations, it’s all sorta the same. I’m a certain quality of flyer. I’ve shot some style, but it hasn’t attracted me as much. I shot LOTS of freestyle because I was married to Deanna who was one of the pioneers who pretty much created that. Wingsuit I do also. I shot the 71 way record and if you go to my website you can see some amazing pictures of that. I’m not as current on that as I am on other disciplines, but it’s very dynamic and I love it.
*Photo by Norman Kent, NormanKent.com
One thing that I completely turn my back on for survival reasons is swooping. One of the reasons is because to shoot swooping, you don’t have to be a swooper, a lot of it happens near ground level. So I didn’t want to have to keep up with that. But because of the danger I didn’t want to go that route, especially when I’m not going to be approaching it as a specialization. Something that dangerous should be a specialization, not just as every once in a while visiting it.
And on top of that because my priority is in surviving the deployment with my big helmet, sometimes my helmet weights up to 32 pounds when I’m doing movie work, and so when that happens I need to have a specific parachute and a specific way it’s set up, and it’s completely not consistent with the kind of canopies you need for swooping. So slowly that’s left me behind and I’ve decided not to chase it; the parachute for me is a survival device. But most of the other disciplines I practice and love, both for photographing and participating in.
SDC: I remember thinking to myself at the Work Stinks Boogie, “how does he hold his head up with that camera helmet on, let alone skydive with it.” But I guess it’s something you get used to over time.
NK: Yeah that’s exactly how it is, you figure it out. If you really think about it, the analogy I use is one that most skydivers can relate to which is skydiving is looked at the same way by non skydivers, like “how can you do that.”
And then the skydiver goes “well what do you mean?” To us it’s pretty normal.
What you’ve done is turned something that wasn’t normal into something normal by simply understanding it, practicing it, getting comfortable with it. And at that point it becomes a normal part of your life and what you consider comfort level, and then, it’s really not that crazy at that point. And so the same things happen with a helmet. The reason why it’s considered crazier is just because it’s less common that people have on a huge helmet like that and the size appears to be not as necessary. But you have the same thing, you get used to it, you make it normal, you understand it, then you have a relationship with it that to you makes it not so crazy. That’s sort of the same with any sport and anything else.
To be honest with you, my theory is that that is the addiction in our sport and the addiction of anything like that. Meaning, the addiction is taking something that seems abnormal, you work it out physically and mentally so that it becomes normal, and now you’re living in this world that’s completely extraordinary, but you are in a comfort zone there to a certain extent. And when you do that, then you add something else and start tackling more disciplines to engage your mind.
…stay tuned on Friday for part 2 of my interview with Norman Kent and learn a little more about his career, the practices and techniques he recommends for skydivers, and one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard.
Blue Skies!
Ashley
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