Jeffrey Milstein earned his pilot's license while still a teen, when he would hang around the Los Angeles International Airport runway, thrilled by the proximity of the powerful planes passing at around 200 mph. His forensic-looking photographs of silhouetted airplanes have seen multiple exhibits and been published in a book. He now adds to this series some spanking new images, some of which you can see here for the first time. Included are military and historical aircraft, and this time the process allows for looser compositions, and much larger images. Mr. Milstein:

"The Continental Boeing 757-200 was shot while landing at LAX, with the new 80 megapixel Phase One IQ180 digital back on a Contax 645. I used a Zeiss 350 mm telephoto with an extender, on a tripod. I have been shooting this type of photo for years so it was exciting to see the detail in the pilots face to greater amount than I had ever seen before. For the new underneath shots with the 80 mpxl you don't really see a big difference until you start blowing them up to four feet and larger. I want to print them as large as I can, to capture how it feels when they are right overhead when I take the photo. The heavy jets are huge for just that second, and then they are gone. That's what I want to capture."

“AirCraft: The Jet as Art,” an exhibit of Jeffrey Milstein’s photographs of airplanes, is on view now at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. through Nov. 25. All images courtesy Jeffrey Milstein.

Continental Boeing 757-200