(Photo provided) The cover of the fall 1982 edition of Athens Magazine featured a photo taken hundreds of feet below ground.

My life as a photographer has had a lot of ups and downs. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean high places, and some really low places. Sometimes the location is the story, and other times it’s just a good angle. One of the tricks of good photography is putting your camera at a location that will give the reader a view that they normally can’t get.

The highest I have gone to take photos is a few thousand feet. My first time flying, unlike most normal people, was not in a plane, but in an Ohio Air National Guard helicopter. A Bell UH-1 Iroquois to be exact, Nicknamed the ‘Huey’ — the craft was a workhorse in the Vietnam War and beyond. On a hot summer day in the early 1980s a few of them were being used to ferry a bunch of local politicians and a couple of journalists from the Zanesville Municipal Airport to Camp Perry on Lake Erie to watch a local guard unit train. Once there we took a smaller helicopter up to take aerials of tanks shooting live ammo at flags being towed behind drones. Taking aerials of tanks firing into the air in hindsight, may not have been my best move.

Helicopters make a great shooting platform. When covering the horrible floods at Shadyside, I managed to get a seat in a helicopter assigned to the West Virginia governor’s office. The craft provided a great angle from which to shoot.

It helps if you can take the doors off a helicopter, so you have a clear shot of the ground without having to take photos through the plastic windows, something that I have been able to do when photographing locally. The seatbelt brings on a new importance when it is the only thing between you and the houses 1,000 feet below.

Planes can make good platforms from which to shoot as well, which is how I ended up in a World War II vintage bomber at the Wood County Airport, which was an assignment more about the aircraft than the view out the window.

The smoothest ride however would be one in a hot air balloon. A Barlow area man flew one from the Barlow Fairgrounds for a few years. I did a photo essay on him during which I flew in the basket. The ride in a balloon is extremely smooth and quiet, the landing can be a little rough because you basically drag the basket along the ground until it stops.

Not all aerial photographs are from aircraft.

The giant cranes that you see working on signs along the Interstate also make good shooting platforms. I stopped to photograph men working on one of the signs along Pike Street and found myself in a wire basket being blown into the sign about 10 minutes later.

I am normally all-in when I hear someone say, “make sure he has a hard hat on and is wearing a harness,” which is how I ended up high above the Hills Covered Bridge a few years ago when it was be renovated. My ride that day was a giant lift nearly as long as the bridge.

Sometimes going high just needs a ladder, or a picnic table to stand on, which is how I embarrassed at least one daughter when taking photos before high school proms.

Going low is another thing. It is good to photograph things at their eye level, so if it is something like a dog, getting low will produce a better photo. It is good to photograph flowers from the same level as the flower, which is how I ended up laying on my stomach in Muskingum Park only to look up to see my wife photographing me laying in the park and a group of strangers walking down the sidewalk photographing my wife photographing me.

The lowest I have gone to take a photo is around 1,000 feet down in a coal mine. Meigs #2 to be exact, where in 1982 a reporter and I climbed in an elevator at ground level and pressed down. Way down. The coal seam was about an inch higher than I was wearing a hard hat, boots, a head lamp, coveralls, a self-rescuer and carrying around 25 pounds of camera gear. The assignment was uncomfortable for many reasons, including the fact that it was an active mine, and the long wall was collapsing behind the equipment. “It is supposed to do that,” one of the miners reassured me. I have had the utmost respect for the men and women that go underground to mine ever since.

If you happen to see me somewhere in the Mid-Ohio Valley up in a tree, or laying face down in the park, rest assured, I am fine. I’m just trying to get a better angle.

Art Smith is online manager of The Marietta Times and The Parkersburg News and Sentinel, he can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com.