Where the Eagle Soars: Over British Columbia's Islands

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

A first book from a dedicated aerial photographer records the stunning
scenery that drew Russ Heinl to settle on Vancouver Island in order to
devote himself to capturing such images. Nature artist Robert Bateman
begins his foreword by placing Heinl’s work in the category of art.
The artist compares Heinl’s use of lighting to that of Vermeer and
Caravaggio, and his shapes and rhythms to those of the
post-Impressionists.

Where the Eagle Soars has almost no text. It consists of more than 100
full-page color photographs that compose a symphony knit from sea and
sky, wind and rock, seabirds and occasional signs of human life.

Heinl, in his Hill 12E or Hughes 300 helicopter, is himself the eagle
of his title. On an opening double-page spread of the ’copter against
a flaming sunrise, he offers a dozen lines of poetic prose on the
scenery that moves him deeply. He then sketches the difficulties and
challenges of aerial photography and the lure of this spectacular
terrain. At the back, nine pages of tiny colored duplicate shots
identify the large images.

And splendid they are: an eagle’s nest with a single eaglet; a
lighthouse, seemingly as inaccessible as the nest; waves boiling at the
foot of sheer cliffs; a shipwreck aground on the Queen Charlottes; even
that dowager queen of hotels, The Empress in Victoria. As Bateman notes,
the secret is light. Heinl captures it beautifully.