A Passionate Skydiver

Most people would find parachuting in itself challenging enough, but not James Wilkinson.

He is a skydiving videographer. He takes videos and photographs of skydiving teams and individuals as they fall from airplanes at nearly 200 kilometres per hour. It’s like driving a racing car or a motorbike at high speed, he says.

He has always been a very keen skydiver himself, and the photography began as a way of financing his hobby. Two years ago some skydiving friends needed a video of one of their jumps. They asked him and his videos had such a success that he did a lot more for other teams. He has taken lots of photographs, too. A recent craze, growing in popularity is tandem jumping. In this kind of parachuting, the paying costumer is strapped to an instructor and jumps out of an airplane with him from 3,600 metres. James thinks everybody should try it.

Because the costumer is with an instructor who knows exactly what he is doing and does all the work, he does not need weeks of training to accomplish his jump. This means that the jump can be made from a greater height than with conventional commercial parachute jumps, and these jumps involve real skydiving – falling through the air before opening the parachute.