Down below, Edinburgh Castle seems to both grow out of and squat atop its elevated volcanic rock. The Old Town buildings recede into the distance and vanish into the ring of mist that surrounds, and gives an ethereal glow to, the city’s other extinct volcanic crag, the hulking mass of Arthur’s Seat. Up above, strips of sky eventually give way to a thick clump of cloud. Skirting it, soaring through the heavens and overseeing the shifting and sliding urban panorama, is a solitary biplane. Its lonely flight against such an immense backdrop conveys a sense of serenity, but also fragility.

This striking photograph from around 1920, simply entitled Edinburgh, is one of over a hundred gelatin silver prints on show in a new exhibition in that city. Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer celebrates the work of a true pioneer. Buckham took many photographs from the air but then went on to manipulate his images on the ground. He used a technique called combination printing which entailed blending a number of different negatives – of land, sky and aircraft – to create a single photographic print. Edinburgh is one such composite work. What looks like a snapshot of a moment in time is in fact a skilfully crafted piece of art.

Born in London in 1879, Buckham became an enthusiast of both photography and flight. By 1914, he was an established photographer and a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. He took to the skies during the First World War as an aerial reconnaissance photographer for the Royal Navy. His military records testify that he had an ‘exceptional’ talent for flying, and he was promoted to captain in the Royal Naval Air Service within a year. Nevertheless, taking images from above was a dangerous business and he crashed nine times. In his last crash, he suffered a severe throat injury and had to undergo a tracheotomy, which left him relying on a tube to breathe for the rest of his life. After the operation, in 1919, he was discharged on a full pension. But the end of his military career did not dampen his twin passions. While recovering from surgery he started making photo-montages from his collection of photographs. He then went up in the air again with his heavy plate camera, travelling far and wide to take, and later create, a series of stunning, and stunningly original, aerial images. By the time of his death in 1956, he was recognised as a trailblazer in his field.

Despite the obvious danger involved, Buckham had a relaxed and often reckless approach to flying. ‘It is not easy to tumble out of an aeroplane, unless you really want to’, he said, ‘and on considerably more than a thousand flights I have used a safety belt only once, and then it was thrust upon me. I always stand up to make an exposure and, taking the precaution to tie my right leg to the seat, I am free to move rapidly, and easily, in any desired direction; and loop the loop; and indulge in other such delights, with perfect safety.’ Standing up and leaning out of an open cockpit with one leg tied to the aircraft’s seat ‘with a scarf or a piece of rope’ was, for Buckham, the only way to work. Sitting down, he argued, would result in the negative being spoiled by the camera juddering into the cockpit due to the vibrations of the aeroplane. He did admit, though, that ‘it is an alarming experience for a beginner to find himself lolling over the side of an aeroplane while the landscape climbs up to the sky, and the horizon loses its horizontality and endeavours to become vertical.’

We get a sense of Buckham’s hair-raising escapades when viewing the photographs he took in dramatic weather conditions. He relished being in the heart of a storm and feeling the full might of the elements, and believed rain, wind and shafts of sunlight produced ‘the most opportunities for picture-making’. Many of these photographs show aircraft as mere specks against spectacular cloud formations. In The Storm Centre, a tiny plane is engulfed by voluminous clouds that resemble the aftermath of a catastrophic explosion. In an equally arresting picture, a spindly autogyro – the predecessor of the helicopter – looks as if it will barely emerge intact from bursts of billowing cloud. In Flying Boat Over Sea, the titular aircraft is precariously poised between a stormy sky and a raging ocean. Elsewhere we see other newfangled forms of aircraft from the 1920s and 30s navigating threatening banks of clouds, from a single-engine monoplane to a two-seater biplane to the R-101 airship.

Some of these photographs come with Buckham’s notes which record his corresponding experience in the air. Again and again he recounts occupational hazards. His eyelashes freeze together and his hands become numb when working without goggles and gloves in sub-zero temperatures. Capturing The Thunderstorm at 10,000 feet exposed him to more than blinding lightning and deafening thunder. ‘The aeroplane sometimes fell several hundreds of feet in deep air pockets,’ he writes. ‘Immediately after taking this photograph our machine seemed to be on fire and the pilot and myself experienced an electric shock.’

One section of photographs is devoted to planes in calmer skies gliding over cities and landmarks. One of Buckham’s most famous pictures, The Heart of the Empire, from 1923, is a captivating shot of a biplane following the curves of the Thames as it snakes through London. It isn’t all urban: the awe of nature is conveyed through slanting streaks of sunlight which add a sheen to sections of the silver river. There are also bird’s-eye views of Lincoln Cathedral and Windsor Castle. Edinburgh is included in a varied section on Scotland. It is one of the few city scenes. Buckham twice attempted to photograph industrial Glasgow but the thick smoke that permeated the city prohibited him from securing clear shots. Instead we come across rolling hills, the golf links of St Andrews and the Wallace Monument in Stirling. In Castle Island, Loch Leven (Where Mary, Queen of Scots was Imprisoned) from around 1920, it isn’t just the miniature biplanes in the vast vault of sky which reinforce the scale of the image, it is also the isolated fortress in the huge expanse of water. In The Forth Bridge, the three steel arches of this triumph of engineering are juxtaposed with the trio of biplanes silhouetted against bright patches breaking through the clouds.

Buckham made journeys further afield, photographing the Alps and a sandstorm over the Great Pyramid of Giza. These adventures helped him prepare for a more intrepid expedition, the biggest of his career. Capitalising on what was a golden age of travel, the American magazine Fortune commissioned him to take a portfolio of aerial photographs ‘anywhere in America’. The result was an epic tour in 1931 which lasted 15 weeks and encompassed 19,000 miles. The Morning Post newspaper also used Buckham’s talent by assigning him to make a written account of his travels. They serialised it in three parts over the winter of 1933-4. In the introduction, the paper’s editor praised Buckham’s articles as ‘a record of cheerful pluck in the face of often desperate difficulties.’

Those difficulties only become apparent later in the exhibition’s section on the Americas. It begins with photographs of the newly constructed Empire State Building and then opens out to take in another recently completed structure, Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. Buckham’s pictures become more interesting when he goes off the beaten track. Highlights include the remains of a pre-Inca civilisation in Peru, the barren wilderness of the Chilean desert and Lake Nicaragua shimmering beneath the clouds. Gradually, we are made aware of fraught circumstances and perilous scrapes through extracts from Buckham’s articles. ‘My journey nearly came to an abrupt conclusion over Buenos Aires,’ he writes, ‘for the door of the cabin aeroplane, through the window of which I leaned to photograph idly swung wide open as I drew back to change a dark slide.’ While crossing the Andes at 19,500 feet he struggles for breath and realises that ‘unconsciousness was inevitable’. His attempts to photograph erupting volcanoes in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua comprise long waits for suitable weather conditions and then treacherous descents through clouds of sulphurous gas into bubbling craters. One of the standout pictures of the exhibition takes us up close to the gaping maw of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl as it emits spouts of smoke and steam.

A final section called ‘In the Darkroom’ shines a light on the technical skill involved in Buckham’s composite photography. It wasn’t a new practice but, by building on existing techniques and employing bold experimentation, Buckham created his own signature style. We learn of the ‘cloud library’ he amassed consisting of over 2,000 negatives and his similar store of aircraft pictures; how he mixed, matched and merged together images of land and sky; and how he used white chalk or black watercolour paints to soften the areas where the negatives met or to enhance specific features.

Sceptics may accuse Buckham of cheating: these are pictures made up of cut, pasted and doctored images. But Buckham never tried to pass his photographs off as single-take shots. His work was merely a form of elaborate editing. The exhibition goes as far as to claim that his groundbreaking techniques paved the way for modern technologies such as Photoshop and AI. Whatever the case, it is hard to criticise Buckham’s approach when taking stock of his end results. His photographs are, at their best, compelling depictions of cloudscapes, and of human vulnerability in the face of the natural world’s volatility. This impressive exhibition celebrates the audacious lengths he took to get the perfect picture, and the magic he created on terra firma. For Buckham was not only a magnificent man in a flying machine or a daredevil with a camera. His passport on display sums him up best. In it, his profession is listed as ‘Artist’.

Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until 19 April.