Personal Aerial Photography

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A few thoughts from someone who has been doing it for a long time.

I’ve been doing aerial photography since I began flying helicopters, way back in the late 1990s. At first, it was a few digital images shot awkwardly with my left hand while my right hand was busy on the cyclic. Later, I went through a variety of different cameras mounted in and on the helicopter, some set to automatically shoot whatever was in front of them and others with limited control from inside the cockpit. I had a POV.1 camera in 2008, which I replaced with a GoPro Hero in 2010. Since then, I’ve had a variety of GoPros, right up to a GoPro 3+. (Even I get tired of throwing money at new versions of hardware.) I’ve created numerous still and video images from my helicopter, some of which still amaze me.

Great Salt Lake
This is one of my very favorite aerial photos: the north end of the Great Salt Lake, shot with a GoPro 3 mounted on the nose of my helicopter as I flew it south to Arizona last autumn. The camera was set to time-lapse mode, shooting one photo every minute. We were probably about 700 feet up here.

But the point of this discussion is this: I’ve been looking at the world from a different point of view for about 20 years now. It’s not the same point of view as an airliner cruising at 29,000 feet and 500 mph. And it’s not the point of view of a private plane cruising at 1,500 feet and 140 mph. It’s the point of view of a helicopter, usually cruising at an average of only 500 feet at 90 miles per hour, with the ability to stop, make sudden turns, or descend for a closer look.

Pilots get used to seeing the world from this different perspective. After a while, it isn’t anything special. We can get a feel for how different things might look from the air: a canyon, a river, a farm, a junkyard. That doesn’t mean it gets boring — it doesn’t. But it does mean that we don’t see anything special about it anymore.

Kind of sad, isn’t it?

That’s one of the reasons I like flying with first time passengers. I get a reminder of what it’s like to see things from a new perspective.

Part 107 Explained
Want to become a commercial drone pilot? Start by learning all about the FAA’s Part 107. This book will help. Buy the ebook edition on Amazon or from Apple. Or buy the paperback edition on Amazon.

But I was reminded again about the novelty of seeing everyday things from above when I watched a documentary on Lynda.com called “Flight Club: Drones and the Dawn of Personal Aerial Imaging.” Listening to the people explain how they felt when they saw these low-level aerial images really helped me understand just how amazing aerial photography is, especially to folks that don’t have a helicopter at their disposal — which, admittedly, is most people.

Folks who know me well know how anti-drone I was when they first started appearing on the scene a few years back. But what convinced me that they were serious photography tools is the quality of the images they produced and the ease at which an operator could get them. I dove into drone photography last winter with the purchase of a Mavic Pro and will be doing a lot more of it in the months to come.

If you are curious about drones for aerial photography, I highly recommend you spend 25 minutes or so watching the documentary I saw last night. I think you’ll enjoy it and learn a lot about why people are so excited about it.

If you do watch, let me know what you think.

Getting Facts, Analysis, and Opinion

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Where do you get your “news” and what are you believing?

Profile
My Twitter profile is a simple list of the things that make me me.

In my Twitter profile, you’ll find the phrase truth seeker. I’m occasionally ribbed by far right Twitter users who don’t like my one-liners, often at the expense of people they support, including Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, Sean Hanity, Bill O’Reilly, and Ted Cruz. These people, who cry “fake news” whenever they hear something they don’t like, wouldn’t know the truth if it hit them with a baseball bat.

But I take truth seriously. I want to know the truth about things. I want to be able to form my own opinions based on facts. I try to be yet another phrase in my profile: independent thinker.

And that’s why I’m so frustrated when people share inaccurate information, including links to false or seriously biased news stories on social media. It was enough to drive me off Facebook and it keeps me fine-tuning the list of people I follow on Twitter.

But what are good, reliable sources of information? Back in February, I blogged about an article in Forbes that attempted to identify some of them. For the most part, I agreed with the list. But it was limited and it failed to indicate any biases or whether the source presented facts, analysis, or opinion.

Some Definitions

Let me take a moment to define each of these, because it’s very important to understand.

  • Facts are truthful statements of what is or was. This is black and white stuff that can be proven and is not questioned (except maybe by people who cannot accept the truth).
  • Analysis puts facts into context in an attempt to explain why they matter. This can be extremely helpful for folks trying to understand the impact of past and current events and why they should care. Although knowledgable people can often make their own analysis, when there are too many facts that impact a situation for the average person to understand, fact-based analysis can be vital for the average person to make an informed decision. Bias can come into play in analysis, but the best analysis sticks to facts and avoids bias.

  • Bias, Defined
    The definition of bias.

    Opinion is what one person or organization thinks about a situation. Opinion can be well-reasoned, based on solid facts and good, informed analysis. It can also be based on false information and similarly flawed analysis. Most often, it’s falls somewhere in between with a mixture of good and bad information and analysis. But it always includes bias, which can seriously degrade the value of the opinion — especially for someone able to think for herself.

So what am I looking for in my news sources? Facts and unbiased analysis so I can make my own opinion.

The Chart

A while back, I came upon an infographic that listed news media sources on a chart. On the Y (vertical) axis was how factual the source was. Higher was more factual. On the X (horizontal) axis was how biased the source was. Middle was unbiased, left was liberally biased and right was conservative biased. The original version of this chart listed quite a few news sources. In answer to a question a Twitter friend asked the other day, I went looking for it online. I found version 3.0, which I’m reproducing in a reduced size here:

Media Chart 3.0
Version 3.0 of the chart by Vanessa Otero. (I highly recommend that you click the chart to view a larger size and the article that explains it.) This is an extremely handy tool for evaluating news sources — so handy that I’ve printed out a copy for future reference and will be looking for updates.

Understanding the Chart

No chart is perfect and if you read the comments on the post that explains this version of the chart, you’ll see that people have argued with its author. In most instances, they’re claiming that various sources should be shifted left or right from their current positions.

If you accept that it’s at least 95% representative of reality — which is where I stand — if you’re looking for facts, you should be most interested in the news sources inside the green box. That actually makes me feel pretty good because that’s where most of the news sources I listed the other day reside: the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, and NPR. In fact, my main source of news is NPR, which is minimally biased fact reporting. I listen to NPR on the radio all day most days when I’m working at home.

If you want analysis, look for sources inside the yellow box. Ideally, you’d want something in the middle of the yellow box, which is nearly empty. One of my favored news sources, the Guardian, falls slightly left in the top of that box; another, the New Yorker, is slightly down and slightly more left. This isn’t terribly surprising since I lean more liberal than conservative in most of my views. Still, neither source is either “hyper-partisan liberal” or “liberal utter garbage/conspiracy theories.” Whew.

The orange and red boxes contain sources that are light on facts, and high on biased opinion. Unsurprisingly most of the news sources listed are either far left or far right. The red box sources are especially troubling in that they include misleading information and/or inaccurate or fabricated information geared toward either far left or far right media consumers. This is where you’ll find Occupy Democrats and the Palmer Report on the left and Fox News and Breitbart on the right. The chart notes that they are damaging to public discourse. (Duh.)

Using the Chart

How do I use this chart? First of all, it’s made me want to spend more time with sources like Bloomberg, Time, and the Economist. These look like they might be good sources of fact and unbiased analysis.

Next, when faced with a “news” story from an unfamiliar source, I’ll look it up on this chart. If it’s in the red box, I’ll basically disregard it. Why should I waste my time trying to figure out what part, if any, in the story is factual? I certainly won’t share it — and I’ll downgrade my opinion of the reliability and judgement of anyone who does.

If it’s in the orange box, I may or may not disregard it, depending on the topic and the availability of corroborating stories. But again, why should I waste my time trying to figure out what to believe in a story?

Instead, I’ll focus on what’s in the green and yellow boxes, as close to the middle of the X axis as possible.

What about You?

What do you think? I’m not talking about the accuracy of the chart here — if you have comments about that, leave them for the chart’s author and she’ll address them. I’m just curious about where people get their news, what they’re looking for, and what they share. Let us know what you think.

And please — do your best to fight real fake news. Don’t share links to unreliable or heavily biased “news” sources.

Tips on Retweeting from a Seasoned Twitterer

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Enough is enough already.

I’ve been using Twitter since March 2007. Since then, I’ve tweeted more than 79,000 times, been verified, and accumulated a modest 3000+ followers. I’ve written extensively about Twitter and have even authored video courses for Lynda.com on the topic. So it’s safe to say that I know a little about Twitter.

I don’t follow many accounts. As of today, it’s only 288. I pick accounts to follow based on my interests and what those accounts tweet. Sometimes I’ll add an account and a few weeks later, realize it was a mistake and unfollow it. It’s nothing personal. I just need to focus on the things that matter to me.

Recently, I unfollowed three accounts that were simply retweeting far too many tweets. I realized that their retweets violated a handful of “rules” I’d come up with to manage my own Twitter activity and retweets. This morning, I set them down in a short Twitter thread.

For the record, I pretty much detest Twitter threads — that’s when a twitter user replies to his/her own tweets creating a connected string of them — especially if they’re longer than three or four tweets. So you can imagine how much I hated making one that was seven tweets long. In my opinion, if you can’t say something in 1000 characters, you need a blog. I have a blog so I’m going to lay the contents of my thread down here where it can be easily read and found by others.

Here’s the thread, expanded.

1/7 The Intro

I was trying to be kind with this tweet. I had recently unfollowed someone who would consistently retweet multiple subtweets in a thread, none of which made sense on their own. And the previous week, I’d unfollowed someone who retweeted every single tweet in a lengthy thread, thus repeating the entire thread in my timeline in reverse order. And there were countless other people who seemed to retweet just about everything they saw, no matter where it came from. Enough was enough. I had to speak up.

2/7 Don’t Echo Threads

The other day, someone I followed retweeted the first tweet of a thread I thought might be interesting. I clicked the tweet and read the thread — all 20+ tweets in it. When I was done, I returned to my timeline and continued scrolling up. I saw the second tweet in that thread — which I’d already read. And then the third, and fourth, and fifth. And I’ll be damned if every single tweet in the thread wasn’t retweeted right there in my timeline.

After I’d already read the thread.

Why would someone do that? Don’t they understand the way retweeting works? The way threads work? Maybe not. Hence, this piece of advice: Don’t retweet every single tweet in a thread. Just retweet the first one or the one or two that resonate with you.

Sheesh.

3/7 Don’t Retweet without Context

The other day, I unfollowed someone who retweeted about a dozen subtweets with absolutely no indication of what they were all about.

Imagine this: You read a tweet, then click it to read some of its responses. As often happens, the responses branch off into various threads, some going off into weird and fun tangents. One of these subtweets strikes you as funny or interesting, given the context in which you’re reading it. But the tweet itself doesn’t include any hint of the context.

It’s like the punchline of a joke without hearing the joke.

Yes, it’s hilarious. And yes, you want to share it. But think a moment. If someone didn’t read the tweets leading up to it, would they get the joke? If the answer is no, don’t retweet it.

After all, do you walk around reciting joke punchlines without the joke leading up to it?

4/4 Don’t Hijack Tweets

This is a pet peeve of mine, mostly because of my feelings regarding content creation.

Twitter offers two ways to retweet:

  • Retweet without a comment.
  • Retweet with a comment.

When you retweet with a comment, Twitter lets you enter the full text of a tweet and append the tweet you are repeating to it. The tweet normally appears right below it.

Twitter offers this feature so you can add your own thoughts about the tweet to it while retweeting it in a way that preserves it. But what this also does is basically turn that tweet into a new tweet — your tweet — so when people reply, like, or retweet, they are retweeting your tweet. The interaction does not appear on the original tweet.

Hijacked Tweet
How many times have you seen something like this? A one-word comment or finger arrow pointing at a tweet? A “comment” that adds absolutely nothing to the tweet but effectively hijacks it so the retweeter gets all the likes, retweets, and possible new followers? (For the record, I deleted this example right after I made it.)

And, of course, abusers use this to, in effect, hijack popular tweets.

A very good friend of mine did this very often and it upset me to the point where I unfollowed her.

If you’re going to retweet with a comment, make a real comment. Something that adds to the discussion or points out a fallacy or points followers to more information at another source or tags someone you think should see it.

Keep in mind that all tweets that you retweet with a comment are retweeted to everyone who follows you, including people who already follow the original tweeter. So you’re repeating the tweet. What good is that if your comment doesn’t add to the discussion? It’s just more noise.

5/7 Don’t Retweet Unreliable Sources

This is a tough one. As my friend and fellow author Sandee pointed out, how do you know who is reliable and unreliable these days?

I wish there was an easy answer. I know who I believe — well-known and respected media organizations with good journalism staffs and responsible reporting that are neither far right nor far left. So yeah: I’ll believe (and retweet) the New York Times but not Fox News or Mother Jones. Ditto goes for verified Twitter accounts for employees of these organizations.

And yes, people reading this might not agree that the New York Times is a reliable source. Fine. Just don’t expect me to follow you. I certainly don’t expect you to follow me.

Use your brain, folks. Don’t believe everything put in front of you. Always consider the source. Don’t share something just because you wish it was true. Isn’t there enough misinformation out there?

That’s not to say that I won’t retweet something that’s funny, especially satire that’s obviously fake. We all need a laugh now and then. But if it’s something that people [with a brain] might think is true and it obviously isn’t, I won’t retweet it.

6/7 Don’t Ask for Retweets

There’s nothing that reminds me more of everything I hate about Facebook than including “Retweet if you think…” or “Please retweet” in your tweet. I don’t need you to tell me what to retweet. If something is worth retweeting — in my opinion — I will retweet it. If not, I won’t.

You telling me to retweet something makes it far less likely that I’ll retweet it. Why? Because I don’t want to look like a moron who needs instructions on what to share.

And when you retweet something that includes a retweet request, what do you think I think of you?

7/7 Twitter is an Echo Chamber

I follow only 288 accounts because, unlike so many other Twitter users, I try to read the tweets of all of those accounts. I’m not likely to follow the accounts of people who tweet and retweet a lot of content I don’t find interesting. Don’t take it personally. After all, why should you? Who am I?

I’m just someone who has been using Twitter for a long time to meet a particular need. The advice here is the advice likely already heeded by the people I’ll continue to follow.

Who knows? It might help you get — and keep — followers, too.

A Sad Surprise in a Moving Box

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Old photos bring back old memories and feelings.

Unpacking after a move is a funny thing. If you’ve organized your things properly and packed them into labeled boxes, you logically unpack things you need most first. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since I moved from Arizona in May 2013 and started moving into my new home in early 2015. The kitchen and bathroom and bedroom items were first to be unpacked: pots and pans and utensils, toiletries and bathroom appliances and medicine cabinet contents, clothes and shoes and accessories. Then, as furniture locations were finalized and most of the finish work was done, I reached for boxes containing the extras: silk plants and baskets for atop my kitchen cabinets, collectibles to be arranged in new wall mounted displays, books for my library shelves, framed photographs for the walls. Each item that’s unpacked and put into its place makes my home more like my home.

Lexox Autumn
I love Lenox’s Autumn pattern, which was originally released back in 1918, but only used my set, which was a gift from my mother, three times. Make me an offer. I have service for 9 plus salad bowls and serving plates.

These days, there are still about a dozen packed boxes in my massive garage. Some will likely never be unpacked. Do I really need a set of Lenox china for up to nine dinner guests? Or real silver silverware? Why in the world did I collect all those pin-on buttons at computer shows in the 1990s and early 2000s? My matchbook collection was fun to add to after a dinner out, but who gives away matchbooks these days? And after writing more than 80 books and hundreds of articles, do I really need to keep the box of published clips I began accumulating in the late 1980s?

I’ve been going through the boxes — at least peeking inside them — in an effort to take inventory on what still needs to be unpacked and what can probably be disposed of. I’ve been shifting boxes to the shelves I built in my garage for long-term storage, separating them into three categories: store, sell, and unpack.

And that’s how I came upon the box labeled “Wall Art / Family Photos.” It had been at the bottom of a pile, slightly crushed. I peeked inside. Lots of frames, all carefully packed in bubble wrap. This needed to get unpacked. So later, when I took a break, I brought it upstairs to tend to when I had a chance.

That chance was yesterday evening. I put the box on my dining table and started pulling out the wrapped items, revealing them one after another.

First were two old framed still life prints of fruit. They aren’t very attractive, but they do have sentimental value. They’ve hung in every kitchen in every home I’ve lived in as an adult. It was good to see them. I have just the place for them in my new kitchen.

Then the framed puppy photo of my dog, Spot, who I’d gotten as a birthday present from my future wasband when we lived in our first house together in New Jersey. And a baby picture of me. And a group photo of me with my sister and brother, taken at a Sears photo studio about 20 years ago. And a photo of me standing by my first helicopter.

And then I got to the framed photo of my grandmother and her sister when they were kids. The photo was retouched, slightly enlarged, matted, and framed. It shows the two girls in sepia, sitting on the roof of their apartment building in the Bronx. My aunt Fanny is holding a small dog. I’d found the picture somewhere and had the touch-up work done, then made a framed print for my grandmother for Christmas one year. At the same time, I’d made one for myself.

Old Photo
The photo of my late father-in-law was tucked into the frame of the photo of my grandmother and her sister. I honestly don’t remember packing it, but I’m glad I did.

But it was not that photo that prompted this blog post. It was the more modern portrait of a man stuck into the side of the frame: my late father-in-law, Charlie.

I don’t remember packing the photo, but I must have. I always liked Charlie, who died suddenly and very unexpectedly of a massive heart attack only a year after he retired. He was fun and had a good sense of humor. Although he teased his wife mercilessly — which I’ve admitted elsewhere bothered me a lot — he took good care of her and stuck with her through thick and thin. She could not have been an easy person to live with and I suspect the teasing was one of the ways he dealt with it. But he was a man who understood what marriage was all about, what those vows really meant.

Unlike his son.

Early on in my divorce, when I was living alone my Wickenburg home, I put a photo of Charlie and his wife on my front door with a post-it note attached. The post-it note obscured Julia’s face, pointed to Charlie, and said something like “He would be ashamed of you.” My future wasband eventually saw the photo when he came to the house and took it away with him. I hope he got the message, but I doubt it.

But I know Charlie would have been ashamed of him. And I’m glad he was spared the pain our divorce likely would have caused him. I wish my family could have been spared the same pain.

Seeing his photo tucked into that frame reminded me of all this. It made me sad. Sad that he left so soon after his retirement, just at the point where he likely expected to relax and spend time with his family and friends. Sad that he was gone. Sad about all the things he’d missed.

And sad that his son couldn’t have been more like he was.

I’ve discarded or hidden away most of the reminders of the 29 years I spent with the man who betrayed my trust and broke my heart. But this is one I won’t put away. I’ll get a frame for Charlie’s photo and put it with the others on the table behind my sofa. Charlie is a man worth remembering.

Killer Floods

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A review with a backstory.

Last summer, I did a flying gig that started in Spokane and had me flying over a good portion of the state. The client was a video production company based in the U.K. that was working on a NOVA documentary about the ice age floods, which are often referred to as the Missoula Floods.

If you don’t know anything about the Missoula Floods, here’s the short version. Millions of years ago, when the Cascades were a chain of active volcanos, they laid down layer after layer of lava that became (mostly) basalt rock. The Ice Ages came and a sheet of ice stretched from the North Pole down into the northern United States. In Montana, the ice sheet formed a dam across the mouth of a valley and huge volumes of water accumulated behind it. Over time, the ice dam was eroded and broke free, releasing all that water very quickly. It came downstream, across Idaho and Washington State, carving out some very interesting canyons and other formations. Then the ice dam was created again and broke again and created again and broke again. This cycle happened at least 15 times, depending on who you talk to, starting about 16,000 years ago. It explains the modern geology of Central Washington state’s coulees (those carved canyons), potholes, dry waterfalls, and so-called Scablands. You can read more about this in Wikipedia. Or you can just watch the documentary I’m reviewing here.

The best way to get an idea of the massive scale of the hydrologic action resulting from the Floods is from the air. Sure, you can take a hike into a coulee or to the top of Dry Falls and look around, but it isn’t until you get a few hundred feet up that you realize just how enormous these places are. So the film crew looked for a helicopter with a Cineflex camera mount. Of course, there aren’t any of those outside a big city and they did have a budget so bringing one in was not an option. They did, however, find my helicopter company, Flying M Air, which, at the time, owned a Moitek gyrostabilized camera mount (which I’ve since sold).

I should mention here that this is the one and only time that damn camera mount got me a flying gig. I bought it to increase my aerial photo business and very seldom used it. I charged a fee for its use and it probably finally paid for itself sometime in 2014; I’d owned it since 2009. It was a beautiful piece of equipment, exquisitely hand made right here in Washington State, but it weighed a ton and took 30 minutes to assemble and another 20 minutes to break down. I hated dealing with it, despite the $500 per use fee I charged. Packed in two huge Pelican cases — one for the mount itself and one for the three Kenyon KS-8 gyros that went with it — it took up space and gathered dust on my garage floor. I sold it to an LA-based pilot for just $5K this past summer. What a steal. The gyros alone were worth more than that — but I don’t miss it one damn bit. It was not one of my best asset acquisition decisions.

The Flights

Turns out that they needed a videographer who could use the mount and had appropriate equipment to mount on it. I turned to Charley Voorhis of Voortex Productions, one of the two local video companies I’ve worked with. Charley has some impressive equipment — I think he brought one of his RED cameras for this gig — and lots of experience with the mount. (I almost wish he’d bought it.) Then I stepped back and let him make his deal with the client. All I cared about was flying.

The day of the flight came and we left, bright and early, for Spokane. I’d already set up the mount as far as I could, tying it down with gaffer tape since it would be out of balance until a camera was on it. I’d put the door back on so we could maximize cruise speed to get to the client meeting site; the helicopter is limited to 100 knots with any door off. We got there on time and met at the FBO to come up with a plan. I had them top off the tanks with fuel and removed the door where the camera mount was. Charley set up his camera.

We wound up doing several flights. The first was a long one that started in Spokane, flew directly out to Dry Falls — which is about 2/3 of the way back to Wenatchee — circled that more times than I can count, and then headed down the smaller lakes to Ephrata, past Moses Lake, and over the Potholes Reservoir. On board were me (of course), Charley, and the video director (or producer?) who told Charley what shots to get. The mount took up a whole seat but I wouldn’t have taken a third passenger if I could; I have a strict policy regarding the number of people on board for photo flights and always limit it to three.

Dry Falls Photo Shoot
Here’s a closeup of my track, recorded automatically by ForeFlight, for the time we were in the Dry Falls area. What’s ironic here is that we flew around in a noisy helicopter for a good 15 minutes and likely bugged the hell out of people on the ground. A drone probably could have gotten the same footage without disturbing so many people. (Of course, it would have taken most of the day.) But because Dry Falls is a Washington State Park, drones are prohibited. Go figure, huh?

Dry Falls
Photo of Dry Falls by © Steven Pavlov / http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Senapa, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16059590 I think that most of the footage shot from my helicopter and used in the documentary was shot in this area.

After refueling at Moses Lake — we’d flown about 2-1/2 hours since leaving Spokane — we pretty much high-tailed it back to Spokane. Then we did two flights south past Cheney and east of Ritzville. That’s where the Drumheller Channels are. I’d never even heard of the place, but apparently it’s one of the best examples of the Channeled Scablands. One flight was with the same group on board; the other was with the geologist you see in the documentary. When the geologist was on board, the client’s own videographer flew with me, sitting beside me to shoot the geologist in the seat behind me as he spoke about what we were flying over. That’s probably also when they got footage of my helicopter’s panel and even me. Those two flights each took about a 1-1/2 hours with refueling in Spokane between each one.

After that, we were done. I dropped everyone off in Spokane, retrieved the door, and put it back on. Charley and I sped back to Wenatchee where we went our separate ways.

I think the whole gig was supposed to be just 5 hours, including travel time, but I flew (and billed for) more than 9. It was a very lucrative gig. But what was [almost] better was how much I saw and learned about the geology of the state. That’s one of the reasons I like doing aerial photo work; I get to see and learn a lot.

The Documentary

I have to admit that once my invoice was paid — which took a little effort since the money was coming from the UK — I didn’t give the project much thought. I didn’t even blog about it. That’s probably because last summer was very busy for me and I did a lot of cherry drying work. I even dried cherries later that day. I’d stopped blogging about my interesting flights, although I really don’t know why.

So imagine my surprise when a lawyer friend asked me yesterday in an email if he’d just seen my helicopter in a NOVA episode.

I went online and found the NOVA episode titled Killer Floods immediately. And although I rarely watch television during the day, I’m recovering from a cold and figured it was a good way to kill an hour. So I sat down, fired up the Roku with PBS, and watched it.

Let me start by saying I generally like NOVA documentaries. At least I used to. They’re filled with facts and good videography and leave you feeling better educated about topics than you were before you watched them. But I don’t know if it’s a general trend in documentary filmmaking or just a new NOVA style, but it seems to me that they’re trying too hard to sensationalize the topic or apply it to today’s world.

Two things immediately struck me about this one.

First, the name: Killer Floods. This particular documentary covered three flood events, all three of them were prehistoric. So although it’s likely that they killed something — plants? animals? — they didn’t have an impact on man at the time. In addition, their significance was not the fact that things were killed but more that the flooding changed the shape of the landscape by suddenly and violently eroding and washing away rock.

Second, the attempt to suggest that the three floods documented in the video have anything whatsoever to do with today’s flooding due to climate change. They managed to include footage from the flooding in Houston from Hurricane Harvey — a mere two months before air time! — which has absolutely nothing to do with these three prehistoric floods. Yet the narrator suggested that they might be related. I think that’s stretching it beyond reasonability.

But hey — I get it. They want people to watch so they come up with sensationalized names (see also Killer Hurricanes and Killer Volcanoes), and try to get people interested by pointing to recent events that they’re familiar with. After all, is the average person going to be interested in a documentary about how three prehistoric flood events changed the landscape in relatively remote areas of Central Washington State and Iceland or under the English Channel? I doubt it. NOVA is competing with reality TV, sitcoms, and sports. While I’m interested in just about any topic NOVA covers, most people aren’t. Sad but true.

That said, I thought the documentary was well written and produced, with plenty of good videography, interview clips, and narration. It walked viewers through the logical process of figuring out how each of the three landscape formations they were researching were actually made. (I already explained the one in Washington State; I’ll let you watch the documentary to learn about the other two.) The Washington one was a bit slow for me because I already knew the answer but I found the other two fascinating. I’ve been planning a trip to Iceland for late next summer and may extend it a few days to take in some of the sights shown in the documentary. And now I have a fresh desire to see the White Cliffs of Dover.

But what really tickled me was seeing my helicopter near the very beginning of the documentary, with the Flying M Air logo prominently displayed. Later, a shot shows my door with my name on it. And somewhere else near the beginning, you can see the helicopter’s controls and even a quick shot of me looking like a bit of a bum in my gray sweatshirt.

Those glimpses were enough to get my brother, who never picks up the phone, to give me a call yesterday evening. “I’m watching NOVA. Is that your helicopter?”

And that set off an hour-long conversation about all kinds of things. Heck, I talked more with him yesterday evening than I had all of last year. (Seriously: he just doesn’t like to talk on the phone.)

This obviously isn’t the first time I’ve been involved in a video production. I’ve been flying this helicopter since 2005 and have done countless video/photo shoots over the past 13 years. But I’m pretty sure this is the first one that has appeared on PBS or a highly respected documentary series like NOVA.

It’s about as “big time” as my little company will get — and that’s okay with me.

If you’re going to watch it, watch it soon. The website says it “expires” on December 7. If you’re really interested in flood-related geology, why not get the video? You can buy it on iTunes.

Look for me in the credits.