Paid to jump out of airplanes!

I must have been told it a few hundred times while I was doing the skydiving diploma last year..."When your time comes to do camera, you won't get any warning! You need to have all your equipment ready to go, so the moment the boss asks you to do camera on the next load, you can get straight in there and do it!" Geoff Mundy, our course director, never got tired of telling us this, and a good thing I took him seriously because yesterday it happened to me.

With no warning I got asked if I could do camera on the next load! I could hardly believe it, a million different thoughts were suddenly fighting for space in my head, and whilst trying to control the surge of adrenalin pumping round inside me I got myself ready to do my first paid skydive!

I'm ready, in the plane and climbing to altitude, trying to calm myself and think about what I have to do. Skydiving is a sport that is never done well whilst tense or stressed, it requires relaxation and focus of body and mind, otherwise you fall out of the plane like something resembling a plank of wood!

At this moment Geoffs most infamous words come back to me vividly..."Whatever you do, don't fuck up!" Now this is possibly not the most helpful lesson he ever taught me, but fortunately the thought made me smile and relax a bit. I went through the jump in my head, got ready, and climbed out the door! The rest, as they say, is history.

I did a second jump the same day, which was slightly less nerve wracking, and I was up to do a third but we got cancelled, due to too much cloud, so that was it.

I am now officially a stand-by cameraman at one of the busiest commercial dropzones in the world! It's quite surreal for me to realise that I've made it ... I now get paid to jump out of planes and film people. It's something I wanted to do since the first day I started skydiving back in 2000. I thought at the time that the guys on camera had the best jobs in the world, and you know what, I was right!