Author Archives: Maria Langer

Hovering with the Balloons

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Just a quick post after an unusual photo flight.

Hovering with BalloonsI did a “first light” photo flight this morning. The client: me.

I needed a bunch of photographs that could clearly illustrate how a change altitude affects the perspective of an aerial photo scene. So I armed my helicopter with a battery of GoPro cameras, set them up to snap an image every 2 seconds, and went flying at dawn.

For about 90 minutes.

On the way back, I spotted a number of hot air balloons in the sky northeast of Deer Valley Airport. This isn’t anything unusual; the balloons are up every morning for the first hour or two of the day. But what was unusual is my attempt to capture images of the balloons.

Instead of satisfying myself with the usual fly by images, this time, I climbed to about 1,000 feet AGL, pointed the helicopter southwest toward the balloons, and brought it into a hover. And held it there for about a minute.

While I was hovering there, facing the balloons, I got a weird feeling, as if I were a bird trying to join a flock. I could imitate their motion (or apparent lack thereof), but I wasn’t one of them.

Anyway, this is one of the shots I captured, cropped for better presentation. As you can see, there was one balloon at a higher altitude but most of the others were lower. Can you see them all in this shot? I count seven.

I couldn’t do anything about the distance. The GoPro cameras have a wide angle lens, making everything seem farther away than it really is. If I got any closer, the folks in the closest balloon — which was also the one higher than me — may have freaked out. (If you think airplane pilots hate helicopters, you should talk to a balloon pilot one day.)

This isn’t, by far, the best photo shot this morning. But it’s the one I thought of from the moment I lowered the helicopter’s collective to descend back toward Deer Valley until the moment I first viewed it on my computer.

I really do need to spend some time in a balloon soon.

The Fruits of My Labor…

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…or why I love my work as an aerial photography pilot.

Regular readers know that one of my jobs is as a helicopter pilot. Sure, my little company offers tours and day trips from Phoenix in the winter and dries cherries in Washington State in the summer, but my favorite kind of flying is for aerial photography.

To me, there’s nothing more rewarding than being a pilot for a talented still or video aerial photographer. These are the people who not only understand basic photographic concepts such as light and composition and exposure, but who also know what a helicopter can do and how they can use it as a tool to get amazing images of the world around us.

In August 2010, I had the privilege of working again with Mike Reyfman, a regular client, over Lake Powell in northern Arizona/southern Utah. He was there for the AirPano Project, capturing images that would become interactive 360° aerial panoramas, as well as still photos around the lake.

He emailed me yesterday to let me know that the Lake Powell Panoramas had finally been put online. There are four of them, including one shot over Reflection Canyon (see screen grab below). Each image is interactive, drag in the image to pan and zoom. You can click on the helicopter icons to switch from one viewpoint to the next. Here’s where you can find them.

Reflection Canyon

Aerial photo work is challenging, especially with a demanding photographer on board who knows exactly what he wants. Mike is one of those photographers. Not only does he know what time of day he wants to shoot, but he provides instructions regarding shooting location, direction, and altitude. For the panoramic shots, I need to get into an out of ground effect hover, sometimes as high as 3,000 feet above the ground, and hold it there for 5 minutes or more. This isn’t easy in my little R44, especially in windy conditions.

But it’s worth it, as Mike’s panoramic images and other shots prove.

I find it especially rewarding work, though. Although I didn’t create the incredible images the photographers on board make, I feel that I was instrumental in making those images possible. After all, my helicopter and I were part of the photographer’s equipment — almost like a tripod. Surely to say that the image would not exist without us isn’t too far from the truth.

And so despite the challenges and the relative dangers, I love flying aerial photographers. And I love seeing the work they create when they fly with me.

On Facebook and Life History Timelines

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How do you want your online history to read?

Today, I unfriended someone on Facebook.

I’d realized, rather belatedly, that about 90% of what this person shared on Facebook consisted of cat photos or videos. I like cats, but not enough to wade through dozens of photos shared in big batches on Facebook every day.

(Maybe other people do like cats that much. Maybe there are people whose sole purpose in using Facebook is to maximize the number of cat pictures they see every day. I am not one of these people.)

She’s not the first of my Facebook friends to share a never-ending stream of content that simply doesn’t interest me. Normally, if I know a Facebook “friend” in real (as opposed to virtual) life, I’ll retain the friendship status but simply stop subscribing to her content. This enables her to keep reading my content (if she wants to), comment on it, and keep in touch via other Facebook features — wall, messaging, etc.

But this person wasn’t really a friend to begin with — just someone I met on Twitter. And with the introduction of Facebook’s Timeline feature, I realized that Facebook is morphing into something new and different where an endless stream of cat photos seems downright idiotic.

The Timeline Feature

The Timeline feature puts every update, photo, event, and detail in your life that you’ve shared on Facebook into a reverse chronologically displayed listing. Here’s what mine looks like today:

Facebook Timeline

At the top of your profile page is a “cover photo” and your profile picture. Beneath that is information about you, your work, and your relationships. After a box containing a few of your friends, you’ll find every single item you’ve ever posted to Facebook.

Let me say that again: every single item you’ve ever posted to Facebook.

Including all the cat photos.

To make it easier for someone to zero in on a particular date, they can drag a slider on the right side of the page. So if you’ve been posting on Facebook for a few years, people can go back in time to see the Halloween party photo when you dressed up like a hooker or your rant about your old boss or the details about the honeymoon cruise with your ex-husband. Intermingled with this stuff is details about your new jobs, vacations, check ins, and other life events you thought (at the time, anyway) were important enough to share with “friends” — or the public at large — on Facebook.

Have you seen the Timeline feature in action yet? If you haven’t, check it out. Be sure to check out yours, too. Even if it isn’t displayed now, it will be in the future.

You Are What You Post

And that brings me back to the reason I wrote this post. With your Facebook history so easily accessible — possibly to the general public (which is Facebook’s default setting for updates) — people can get a real idea of what you’re all about now and in the past. If you care at all about what people think of you, you probably want to examine your Timeline and make sure it shows only what you want to show — and only to the people you want to see it.

If you think you’re revealing a bit more than you want to in your Facebook Timeline, there are a few things you can do, some of which I discuss in detail in a Maria’s Guides post.

Of course, the best way to limit what people see or know about you is to be more discriminating about what you post. Do you really need to share every intimate detail of your life? Every link to Web content you read? Every photo you take with your smartphone? Every other Facebook update you read that you find mildly interesting or amusing?

Every freaking cat picture?

On Facebook, you are what you post — and Facebook has a very long memory.

What People are Saying about Groupon

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A list of links of interest to people who want to learn more about how Groupon is screwing small businesses and customers.

A while back, I wrote a few posts about Groupon — including “Why Groupon is Bad for Business…and Consumers” — that continue to be among the most popular posts on this site. But if you really want to learn more about the dark side of Groupon, I urge you to check out some of the links I’ve collected over the past year or so:

  • Groupon gripes: Are daily deals headed for disaster? – Like I’ve been saying, SOMEONE has to pick up the tab on these great deals, and it’s usually the business owner, sometimes disastrously.
  • Why Groupon is bad for your business (and mine) – “Groupon, the so-called social buying site (even though there is very little social going on outside of the manipulation of basic human behaviors like their reaction to a situation where there is sense of scarcity) and the fastest growing company in history, is bad for your business.” Read why on EmergenceMarketing.com.
  • Groupon Reviews: Worst Marketing For Your Local Business – “Just because millions of merchants have fallen under the spell of Groupon, a PR juggernaut, and their like, it doesn’t mean you should. It’s a killer alright, a profit-killer.” Read a real case study on RetailDoc.com.
  • Groupon’s big discounts: how its coupon business could eventually cripple the merchants that rely on it – The author of this piece almost gets it. “The logic is simple: Merchants are encouraged to use the deals to attract new customers, who in theory will return at full price. But, in what seems to be an increasing number of cases, customers come for the deals and then leave for deals offered by other merchants through Groupon. So the number of “new” customers attracted by cheap prices increases, and the number of loyal customers decreases as shoppers prefer to become “new” again for whomever offers the best deal.” Read more on Slate.
  • 2 of 2 Daily deal sites: retailers tell their side of the story – Another objective look at Groupon, this time from the retail side.
  • Groupon Was “The Single Worst Decision I Have Ever Made As A Business Owner” – More on Groupon.
  • Why I Want Google Offers And The Entire Daily Deals Business to Die – Thank you, TechCrunch, for bring more attention to this problem.
  • Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse – “Businesses are being sold incredibly expensive advertising campaigns that are disguised as “no risk” ways to acquire new customers. In reality, there’s a lot of risk. With a newspaper ad, the maximum you can lose is the amount you paid for the ad. With Groupon, your potential losses can increase with every Groupon customer who walks through the door and put the existence of your business at risk.” I couldn’t have said it any better. On TechCrunch.
  • Why Groupon is Bad for Small Business – Some specific notes on what’s wrong with Groupon from the small business owner’s point of view. Excellent points.
  • Groupon Is a Straight-Up Ponzi Scheme – Why Groupon can’t work in the long run: “The vast majority of local merchants can’t discount more than 10 percent. Some can go maybe 25 percent in special situations. But 75 percent is a wholly unsustainable number. If all local merchants begin using Groupon then it can’t send loyal customers to anyone; Groupon can only send discount chasers to merchants. Which means that as Groupon grows, both local merchants and their competitors will find that Groupon’s main argument no longer works (if it ever did) — Groupon simply can’t send them loyal new business. So they all stop using Groupon in its current form.” Read the rest of this interesting article on Knewton.com.
  • Groupon amends IPO filing to remove odd accounting – Read about it in Business Week.
  • Groupon’s loss jumps in second quarter – “Groupon Inc.’s second-quarter loss more than doubled as it hired more than 1,000 new employees, even though the Internet daily deals company trimmed back its marketing costs.” Read more in Crain’s.
  • Groupon IPO: Could the company really be worth $30 billion? – While investors may be stupid, analysts usually aren’t. Did anyone really fall for Groupon’s creative accounting? Read about it in Slate.
  • Are online coupons worth it? – Another aspect of Groupon: online reviews of your business. Interesting experience and food for thought.
  • The economics of Groupon: The dismal scoop on Groupon – The Economist provides some real-life numbers on Groupon, showing that original estimates of their IPO value were extremely optimistic. Marketing expenses are currently eating up more than 60% of their revenues. I can’t see how that could possibly be sustainable, especially when they’re losing merchants and customers every day.
  • Groupon demand almost finishes cupcake-maker – Simple math: sell enough product at a loss and you will find yourself in deep financial do-do. Don’t let Groupon fool you into offering a deal like this.
  • Groupon Snafu Leads Baker to Produce 102,000 Cupcakes – Another Groupon horror story indeed.
  • Groupon to be investigated by Office of Fair Trading – “Advertising watchdog refers daily deals website after it was found to have broken UK ad regulations 48 times in 11 months.” And so it begins in the UK.
  • more to come…

I’ll update this regularly as I find more links.

Got a link to another Groupon-related piece you’d like to share? Put it in the comments.

Flying M Air Videos on You Tube

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I didn’t find what I hoped to, but am still pleasantly surprised.

After taking Santa in for a landing at Deer Valley Airport Restaurant twice and seeing well over a hundred people waiting for us on the ground each time, I assumed that someone would have shot some video and put it on YouTube. After all, people put all kinds of stuff on YouTube and I thought seeing Santa step out of a shiny red helicopter might be YouTube worthy.

So I did a search using various search words and phrases.

And although I didn’t find any videos of our recent Deer Valley Airport appearances, I did find three other videos shot by my passengers over the past two years and posted on YouTube. They’re kind of fun. Enjoy.