Photographer recounts the moment he took the photo of a skydiver crossing the sun

(CLO) Standing in the middle of the dry lake Wilcox Playa in Arizona (USA), astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy tried to keep his balance to take a photo he had prepared for many months.

All around, onlookers held their breath and watched. Throughout the morning, six failed flyovers by the plane made McCarthy and his colleagues nervous.

In the sky, his friend and would-be jumper, Gabriel C. Brown, waited for a signal over his headset. “At first, we thought if we failed, we could just land, fold our parachutes, and fly again,” Brown said. But the pilot was only free that morning. There was only one chance before the sun rose too high. “Don’t tell me to jump if you’re not 100 percent sure,” Brown warned.

The countdown sounded: “Three, two, one, go!” Brown jumped out of the plane and shouted into his headset: “Did you get it?” This time he did. In the frame, a small figure hovered in front of a sun with sharp fringes. “We’ve created something special,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy used image stacking techniques, aligning and combining thousands of frames to sharpen the sun's features and reduce noise in the image.

McCarthy grew up in a room filled with planetariums and glowing planets. At age 7, he would use a telescope with his father to look at Saturn and Jupiter. Although he didn’t fully understand them, he was drawn to “the feeling of seeing another world .”

When he grew up, bored with his desk job and with only $500, he bought a telescope. The feeling of “being small but being a part of the universe” made him decide to share this with others. Starting with an old iPhone, then moving on to installing professional photography equipment, he dove into astrophotography like a dream with no way out.

Six years later, McCarthy’s project was getting more ambitious. Having already photographed a rocket flying across the sun, he wanted more. During a parachute jump, the idea flashed: “What if someone jumped out of a plane and stood right in front of the sun?”

To get the shot, the sun had to be low, the jumper had to be high, the plane had to be in line with the camera, and McCarthy had to align it down to the second. When the telescope reflected a bright light—a sign of alignment—the pilot immediately took the course.

They called the photo “The Fall of Icarus.” Not because it was tragic, McCarthy said, but because it reminded them that nature was more powerful than anything humans could control. Brown called the photo “both a testament to the power of humanity and a reminder that we should not be arrogant.”

Before taking the photograph "The Fall of Icarus", McCarthy took a photograph of a rocket flying across the sun.

When McCarthy published the image, many photographers praised him for “going above and beyond.” But most of the comments asked: “Is this an AI photo?” Anticipating that, McCarthy filmed the entire preparation behind the scenes and publicly revealed the post-production process: stacking thousands of frames to clarify the sun and reduce noise.

But for them, the value lies in capturing the real moment - where a tiny human hovers in front of a giant, blazing star 150 million kilometers from Earth.

Source: https://congluan.vn/nhiep-anh-gia-ke-khoanh-khac-chup-buc-anh-nguoi-nhay-du-ngang-qua-mat-troi-10321658.html