.dropcap { color: #838078; float: left; font-size: 82px; line-height: 60px; padding: 5px 8px 0 0; } An open window on an airplane in flight is not a good sign—except when aerial photographer J. Henry Fair is one of the passengers. Bouncing over the South Carolina coast in a comically tiny Cessna 172—a burnt-orange interior betraying its 1975 vintage—Fair spots something that catches his eye, then jerks open the glass hatch on the aircraft’s door. A deafening roar accompanied by hurricane-force wind fill the cockpit, making the plane’s roller-coaster jolts seem all the more life-threatening. Fair isn’t fazed. Shedding his seatbelt, he leans out the window, pointing his Pentax 645 at the coastal strip of Kiawah Island strung out below. As a boy growing up in nearby Charleston, he and his friends used to visit that nearly uninhabited barrier island in search of wild boar. Now the once-untouched shores are punctuated by 6,000-square-foot mansions with...