Shad Wilson: Welcome to the Machine

Photographer Shad Wilson comes from a construction-business family, and as such he’s always been around heavy machinery.

So it makes perfect sense that when he took up photography – first as a hobby, later as a profession – he gravitated toward big, metal subjects with lots of moving parts, even if “large, curved pieces of shiny metal aren’t the easiest things to shoot.”

In the machinery world, they don’t get much larger or curvier than jumbo jets, so when Oneworld Alliance needed some plane shots for an ad campaign scheduled to run throughout Australia and the UK, the airline consortium – which counts British Airways and Qantas among its members – naturally turned to the Texas-based photographer who considers “the largest aircraft, particularly the 747,” his favorite subjects.

“It is always impressive to be next to something so large that flies,” Shad says.

The artist didn’t necessarily intend to become one of the planet’s preeminent machinery photographers. At first, he shot mostly portraits – until a company that had previously hired him for a national-magazine portrait of its CEO tapped him to shoot their mining equipment.

Shad knew he’d come full circle, uniting his love of photography with his affinity for machines. That first gig led to other mining shots, then a job shooting planes for Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, then separate assignments for major league airlines including American and Lufthansa, and now his big Oneworld shoot.

“I still love making portraits, not that I get to do that much anymore,” Shad says. “But I really enjoy the technical challenge to shooting machines.”

Click here to see more of Shad’s machine-like precision.