Hey everyone, Vincent Ayello here, founder and host of the Fighter Pilot

podcast. If you are into aviation photography, specifically military

aviation photography, well then I have a treat for you.

Joining us today all the way from the United Kingdom is world-renowned and award-winning aviation

photographer Mr. Rich Cooper. How you doing Rich?

Hi Vincent yeah really well thanks, great to be here.

Awesome well I should also say that you've been helping BVR productions for gosh over a year you help us with photography and yeah

imagery and all that but tell us how it all started when did you first become

interested in photography well it picks up a camera for the first time age seven

so my dad's a photographer and picked up a camera for the first time, age seven.

So my dad's a photographer and journalist and stuff.

So from a really early age, he was giving me his camera to play with

and just going to air shows and stuff.

You know, the world was such a different place back then. I mean, obviously, you know, I'm quite old now, so it was a very different place.

There just wasn't the security concerns or anything else. So it just used to go up to airfields and

air bases and stuff and say, can we come in and take some pictures? I've got my son with me, is that all right? And they'd be like,

yeah, sure. And especially because I wanted to go into the REF as a photography.

You know, that was the real drive for it.

But unfortunately, that didn't quite happen because of all the cutbacks

that we had in the 1990s.

So I went and did something very different with my life instead. I became editor of the world's largest aviation magazine, Combat Aircraft, as well as the largest one in Europe as well actually, Aircraft at the time and that spawned a

10 year career of kind of magazines and journalism and photography and

...