I start a week in Vancouver, BC.
I’m sitting on a plastic chair on the front patio of a ground-floor apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, watching four men wash the apartment building across the street. It looks to be a 24-story building and, like most of the buildings in this area, it’s got a steel and glass facade. The four men are sitting on separate wooden seats — kind of like the seats you’d find on a swing set — hanging from ropes on top of the building, about four stories down. Two of them have long hoses and the other two have brushes on long poles and plastic pails. They’re all wearing shorts and sneakers and are doing a lot of bouncing off the walls as they move back and forth and down.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone wash a building before, but it doesn’t surprise me. This is Vancouver, after all. It’s one of the cleanest, well-kept cities I’ve ever seen. Perfectly manicured grassy islands between sidewalks and curbs, trees and flowers, pedestrians and cars. Everything is clean and well-kept. The only graffiti I’ve seen was painted on the back of a rental truck. And although everyone seems to have dog, I haven’t seen a dog turd anywhere.
I’m here recording the audio and video for the first video in a new MacProVideo training video series. Microsoft Word 101 will be a DVD training video for beginning to intermediate Word users. If it sells well, it’ll be followed up with more advanced titles and coverage of Excel and PowerPoint. The work is a bit frustrating and rather tedious, more so because after each 3 to 6 minute segment, I have to wait 6 to 12 minutes for the newly recorded video to render. So I do about 1/3 work and 2/3 waiting. Because I’m recording each segment at least twice, it’s slow going. But, by week-end, I should be finished.
I’d better be. I leave town mid-afternoon on Friday.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying my non-working hours in a clean, safe, and rather beautiful Canadian city. The weather is beautiful, in the mid 70s and mostly sunny, although a marine layer of clouds seems to be drifting in as I type this. My hotel and the office/apartment I’m working at are right on the water near Stanley Park. The view from my hotel room at the Westin is full of boats and seaplanes and healthy people strolling the waterfront.
One of the strangest things I’ve noticed: most of the buildings — including my hotel — have huge floor-to-ceiling windows that open. At my hotel every evening, everyone slides open their big sliding glass doors. Although most patios are too narrow to accommodate chairs, people step out onto that narrow space and gaze down at the hotel’s pool or the marina or even the city skyline. I’ve never seen so many open windows. But why not? The weather is glorious and there don’t seem to be any bugs. Fresh air beats processed air. And air conditioning, although available in my hotel, is not a common thing in this area.
More another time. Got to get to work.
Jim is like me. He doesn’t take a lot of bullshit. He told them what they could do with their hangars and applied for a permit with Maricopa County to build a hangar and helipad at his house. In less than a year, he had a huge hangar on his 48-acre spread with a nicely marked and perfectly legal helipad out front.
We took off to the south, toward the airport. I’d brought along my video camera and Mike was using it to shoot images of the things we flew over. I’ve been wanting to get some good video footage from the helicopter for 
We used to do aerial photography together with a Pentax 67 medium format camera. It was a pain in the butt. The camera could only hold 20 shots (I think), it weighed a ton, and although it did have an exposure meter, it didn’t have automatic exposure. That means the photographer had to adjust the shutter speed or aperture for every shot based on the meter reading. Mike didn’t like to do that. He’d set the exposure once or twice during the whole shoot. So half the pictures would be under or over exposed. Of course, the film couldn’t be processed in WIckenburg — we had to send it out. And we had to send out for enlargements, too. It was idiotic.
Photos of the Grand Canyon do not do it justice. The place is magnificent. The view from every lookout point, from every spot along the trail, is different. Best of all, it can be enjoyed by everyone in whatever dose you’d like to take. Drive up to a spot on the rim for a look. Take a hike all the way to the bottom. Fly over in a helicopter or airplane. Take a raft down the Colorado River.
One of the things about it that interests me is that I have been accused of cooking up a photo that I didn’t “create” with photoshop. This image of my first helicopter N7139L, is an actual air-to-air photo, taken by my husband, Mike, from a Piper Cub airplane as we flew in formation. (And yes, that’s me sitting in the pilot seat, looking right at the lead aircraft and its photographer.) The photo appeared on a lot of my advertising materials, including my business card. Yet when I showed it to my aunt in New Jersey, she refused to believe that it was real. She thought the helicopter had been parked on the ground for the photo and that we’d superimposed it over a background photo taken from the air.
I gave him this first shot of my friend Tristan flying his helicopter near Vulture Peak. I’d leased Tristan’s helicopter for a season to see if a bigger helicopter would help my business. (It did.) Tristan and I flew in formation in the area while Mike took photos. That’s Tristan in the pilot seat.
I told Bert that I needed a photo of my helicopter to start putting together marketing materials. I asked him if he could make a plain red helicopter, without stripes, and change the N-number to the one I’d have on my helicopter, N630ML. Bert delivered this photo via e-mail within hours. It was easy for him — a straight color change job. I probably could have done it if I knew how. But I didn’t. And yes, that’s still Tristan flying. This photo appeared on slides at the local theater and on my Web site.
Later, I flew in formation with my friend Jim and Mike took this photo of the real thing. That’s me in the pilot seat again.