Tag Archives: books

Photo Shoots Done

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Seven hours in the air, numerous hours on the ground, over 140 photos to choose from.

The crunch is upon me to meet my Leopard book deadline, but as I have my cup of coffee this morning, I thought I’d take a moment to update the photo shoot info and provide a few photos and links.

If you’re just tuning in…

Professional photographer and author Jon Davison from Australia has been with me here in Wickenburg since I picked him up at Sky Harbor on Saturday. He’s working on a book about Robinson Helicopters which should feature about 20 operators all over the world. I’m one of four U.S.-based operators that he will include in the book.

Jon has written or photographed (or both) 60 books, including numerous titles for Berlitz and Nikon. Although he was specializing in travel photography, he’s more recently taken on aviation photography. The Robinson book is a special project for an Australian helicopter operator, which may gain support in this country from the Robinson Helicopter Company, which Jon is visiting later today.

The Shoots

We did a total of four photo shoots:

  • N630ML Over Lake PleasantAir-to-Air session. Jon rode with my friend Dave in his Hughes 500c, doors off to get glare-free images of Zero-Mike-Lima. I blogged about that shoot in “Air-to-Air.”
  • N630ML over Little Colorado River GorgeHalf-day flight around northern Arizona. Jon’s goal was to photograph some of the places I typically fly over, as well as to get shots of me at the controls with these places in the background. We started in Wickenburg and flew north over Prescott, Mingus Mountain, Jerome, Sycamore Canyon, Howard Mesa, Little Colorado River Gorge, Roden Crater, Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River, Winslow and La Posada, Meteor Crater, and Sedona. Jon got some great shots.
  • N630ML over Phoenix at NightSunset/Moonlight Dinner Tour. This is one of the tours I offer in the Phoenix area, a flight to a Falcon Field (in Mesa, where we went) or Scottsdale Airport at sunset for dinner followed by a return trip in the moonlight. Jon took some interesting nighttime photos.
  • N630ML at the Norquist HomeLanding at Norquist home. The Norquists have a unique hilltop home on the northeast side of Wickenburg. I flew for them about a year ago when their Realtor hosted an open house and wanted visiting Realtors to see the town from the air. They graciously allowed us to land there for a photo shoot with the house in the background. We enjoyed some wine — well, Jon and Mike did, anyway; I still had to fly — and great conversation with some really nice people. (BTW, the house is for sale.)

These are a sampling of the images. You can find more on the page Jon created for his photo shoots with me.

Air-to-Air

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The best photos of an aircraft usually show it flying.

Sunday morning, I flew in formation with another aircraft for the purpose of air-to-air photography for the fourth time.

I’ll never forget my first time.

The first time I did this was back in 2002. Flying M Air had a 1999 Robinson R22 Beta II helicopter and I wanted some air-to-air photos for advertising material. A friend of mine had access to a Piper Cub and we made arrangements to do the flight early one morning on the east side of Vulture Peak here in Wickenburg.

The friend — who, unfortunately, is no longer a friend — is an accomplished airplane pilot. He can pretty much fly anything with wings bolted on, from sailplanes to Piper Cubs to Boeing 747s. He had a lot of formation flying experience and he insisted on a briefing. The briefing was, well, brief. It consisted of the following information, which was drilled into my head by repetition:

The lead plane leads. The wing plane watches the lead.

In other words, in every formation flight, there’s a lead plane. That’s the one that sets the flight path. The other planes are wing planes. Their job is to watch the lead plane and maintain the formation. In fact, the wing plane should look at only one thing: the lead plane. The lead is responsible for keeping an eye out for traffic, making radio calls, and doing everything else. The wing follows the lead.

“What does the wing do?” he asked me?

“Follow the lead,” I replied dutifully.

This was pretty simple stuff, but I could tell that it was very important to him. And although I felt that he was treating me like a child with all the drilling, I had a feeling that he’d flown with other people who hadn’t understood the simple instructions. He wanted to make sure I understood. I did.

imageWe flew out of Wickenburg Airport early one morning just after sunrise, when the air was still and cool. Mike flew as a passenger in the Cub with my old digital camera. We flew several passes on the east side of Vulture Peak. Sometimes the Cub lead, sometimes I lead. The best photo of the bunch, which you see here, was with me flying wing at the Cub’s 4 o’clock position.

Next, Two Helicopters

A few years later, I made arrangements with my friend Tristan to lease his 2000 R44 Raven I helicopter for a winter season. When Tristan delivered it, I figured I’d take the opportunity to get a few air-to-air shots. We did a little briefing at the airport and took off. Mike took the camera and sat beside me in my R22.

N45PGThe flight wasn’t as structured as the first flight, but it turned out okay. We got some good photos of Tristan around Vulture Peak. I trusted Tristan not to do anything crazy, but there was a certain level of stress as we flew around. I felt a constant need to see where he was because I wasn’t convinced that he understood the whole wing follows lead thing.

Then, A Real Scare

When I got my 2005 Robinson Raven II, I needed new photos. So I asked my friend Jim if he’d fly with me. Jim’s got a Hughes 500c.

I tried to do a briefing. I really did. Jim kept telling me that he understood. I thought he did.

But as we flew, I realized that Jim didn’t give a damn about the wing follows lead thing. He was just going to fly along with me so Mike could take photos.

imagePart of the problem was that Jim sits on the left side in his helicopter and I sit on the right. So when he was flying on my left side, he was mostly in my blind spot and he had difficulty seeing me. And since I thought he’d be watching me, I wasn’t watching him. Until I happened to glance over and see him a little too close for comfort on my left, right after Mike snapped this photo. To say this wigged me out is an understatement.

Sunday

On Sunday morning, I flew in formation with Dave so aviation Jon Davison could get air-to-air photos of my helicopter for his upcoming book about Robinson Helicopters. Dave is a responsible pilot — heck, he sells aviation insurance for a living! He also might just have as many hours flying helicopters as I do, since he flies his helicopter from Wickenburg to Scottsdale and back — a 30-minute flight each way — most days. So I felt pretty confident that he understood the importance of keeping a safe distance from each other and always knowing where the other one is.

A side note here: about a month or two ago, there was a horrific midair collision in Phoenix between two news helicopters. They went down in a fiery crash and all four on board died. Having something like this happen so close to home — especially when it involves people you know — really peaks your awareness for the dangers of flying with other aircraft. I think this was probably on Dave’s mind as well as mine.

Dave's Hughes 500cWe took off from Wickenburg and did a slow orbit around Vulture Peak with me in the lead. Jon sat behind Dave on the left side of the helicopter, dangling his feet out the door. They flew at my 5 o’clock position. At one point, Jon asked me to stop and hover on the east side of Vulture Peak while he and Dave moved slowly around me.

I should mention here that Zero-Mike-Lima performed flawlessly, allowing me to hold out of ground effect hovers at more than 3000 feet MSL. It wasn’t hot and it wasn’t windy and that made things a lot easier for me. But I did have full fuel and a passenger on board, putting me at about 2200 lbs (that’s 300 lbs below max gross weight).

After Vulture Peak, we broke off and started east across the desert to Lake Pleasant, with me flying in Dave’s 7 o’clock position. We decided to do some work over the Quintero Golf Course, which most people around here don’t even know exists because you can’t see it from the main road. Dave went in first to scout the area with Jon. Then they directed me into position over a pond in the middle of the golf course. It was 8 AM and there were a few golfers down there. I hovered about 300 feet AGL over the pond while Jon and Dave flew around me. We managed to get the shots we needed in only 3 minutes, then continued on to the lake.

At the lake, we flew slowly up the east shore at Dave’s 9 o’clock position. The sun was behind Dave’s helicopter, shining right on us and on the lake and mountains beyond it. We did a few shots near the marina, then broke off and headed off to the stone house.

The stone house, which I mention briefly in “Why I Don’t Share GPS Coordinates Online,” sits on a saddle overlooking Lake Pleasant. It’s a magnificent structure — or at least it would have been if it had been completed and if the vandals hadn’t destroyed much of what was there. It made a good backdrop for the photos Jon wanted to take. After hovering around in front of it — and scaring away a small herd of cattle that had been grazing on the hillside — we landed and got out for a visit. The place was in even worse condition than it had been on my last visit more than two years before.

At the Stone House

We climbed back into our helicopters, cranked them up, and took off to a mill site Dave knew of. It turned out to be Anderson Mill on the Santo Domingo wash. We did some more air-to-air work by the remains of the mill, then broke off and flew back to Wickenburg. Over town, Jon got a few more shots of me flying, this time with Wickenburg in the background.

It was a good photo flight.

More Photo Work Done

We spent yesterday on a whirlwind tour of northern Arizona that included Prescott, Jerome, Sycamore Canyon, Howard Mesa, the Little Colorado River Gorge, Roden Crater, the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River (not so grand yesterday), Winslow and La Posada (I love breakfast there), Meteor Crater, and Sedona. We flew with Jon’s door off so he could get glare-free photos out the helicopter. But he also took some shots of me flying, using a wide angle lens so he could get the helicopter and views beyond in the shot. Great stuff.

Jon’s still finishing up his editing of the photos he took, but I’ve been watching him work and they look great. I hope to share a few of them here shortly. And I’m sure at least one of them will become Flying M Air‘s new postcard.

Stay tuned.

By the way, you can read more about the first three photos in this piece in “Retouched Photos?“

Not Enough Hours in a Day

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Still too busy to blog regularly.

I’ve been neglecting this blog lately, which is something I’m not happy about. You see, I need to blog. I need to keep this journal of my life and share tips and how-tos with strangers all over the world.

So when I neglect it, as I have been for the past week or so, I feel bad about it.

I Take Work When I Need To

But the reason I’ve been neglecting things is because I’ve been so busy doing the kind of work that pays the bills. (No, blogging doesn’t do that.) As any business owner or freelancer can tell you, there isn’t always paying work to do. Sometimes, after a dry spell, you have to take the work that comes along.

And that’s how it is with Flying M Air. Summer in Wickenburg simply sucks. I can’t put it any other way. There are few people around and none of them want to fly — including me. It’s just too damn hot. So with just one gig in all of July and just three or four in all of August, I was personally funding Flying M Air again, paying its bills through the dead summer months.

And Flying M Air doesn’t have small bills to pay.

When September rolled along, I was anxious to do rides at the Mohave County Fair for the third year in a row. And right after that, were two good gigs with photographers over some of Arizona’s most scenic areas. Although the Fair gig was a bust this year, the two gigs that followed it earned me more than 15 hours of revenue time. That’s enough to keep Flying M Air in the black for four to five months. Best of all, I have another very lucrative gig lined up for Lake Powell, Monument Valley, and Shiprock at the end of September and beginning of October.

I Work Two Jobs

All these gigs have been keeping me from my office for days at a time. That means I can’t do the work I need to do for my other job, the one that funded Flying M Air in the first place.

I’ve been working on my 70th book, a revision of my Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide for Leopard, since July. It’s a 750-page volume and I decided this year to tear it apart, reorganize it, and rebuild it from the ground up. I’m nearly done, but it’s been a long, hard task from the start.

It’s always hard writing a book about software when all you have is beta. Betas aren’t always stable, so they occasionally crash at the most inopportune times. Betas aren’t always final, so the thing you wrote about two weeks ago might be different today. It’s a constant process of review and revision.

It’s also a process of learning how new features work. Sure, there’s some onscreen help for some of the new features. But it’s spotty and incomplete, designed to teach basics. It’s best used as a starting point for learning more. Only by “playing” with the feature and experimenting with it can you learn the little tricks that give the book value to readers. That’s my job, and it’s both fun and frustrating sometimes.

Tight Scheduling

As I write this, aviation photographer Jon Davison is in my kitchen, cutting up a cantaloupe for his breakfast. Here’s here to photograph and write about Flying M Air and my helicopter for a book he’s writing about Robinson helicopters. We’ll be flying today and tomorrow and probably on Tuesday. Today’s the air-to-air portion of our photo work; we leave in 45 minutes to fly in formation with my buddy Dave, who owns a Hughes 500.

Although this isn’t a paying gig, it’s important. Jon’s coverage of Flying M Air will help me promote the company. The book, when released, will show readers the kind of work I do and places I go. I’m eager to promote my 6-day excursions and this will definitely help.

So I’m squeezing Jon into my schedule. A few days with him followed by a few days of Leopard followed by a few days in the Four Corners area, flying photographers around.

October is another busy month, with gigs on three of the four weekends.

What To Look Forward To Here

When the Leopard book is done, I’ll begin writing short how-to pieces for this blog about it. But don’t expect to see them before Leopard is released. I take non-disclosure agreements very seriously and don’t have any desire to get Apple, Inc. pissed off at me.

And if you like reading about flying, keep checking in. I’m sure I’ll have some things to say about my work with Jon — hopefully, with photos — and the photographers I’m working with at month-end.

Working Hard

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Writing, flying, writing, flying, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I realize that I haven’t been blogging lately. I have a good excuse. I’m unbelievably busy with work.

I have a drop-dead deadline for my Leopard book coming up very quickly now. So whenever I’m at home, I’m in my office with my fat butt planted in the chair in front of my computer, writing about Leopard. The book is coming along very well, but not without some minor problems. Still, if I keep at it, I’ll get it done on time.

Trouble is, I’m not spending much time in my office. After a seriously crappy-to-the-point-of-wasted-time gig in Kingman last weekend, I had to fly up to Page to take some photographers around Lake Powell. For three days in a row.

Confluence of San Juan and Colorado RiversI love Lake Powell. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. And if you think it looks great from the ground or water, you should see it from the air! But after a 4 hour flight on 4 hours of sleep today, I decided I’d had enough of the Lake. Fortunately, I’m going home tomorrow, after dropping off one of my clients in Phoenix.

I’ve been in the Marriott Courtyard here since Monday night. I’ve had five flights totaling over 10 hours of billable time, with about 3 hours more to come. Great for the Flying M Air bank account, which can always use a good cash inflow — especially after a slow summer in Wickenburg. But not great for the Leopard deadline.

So now I’m sitting here at the desk in my hotel room with two laptops in front of me — my MacBook Pro test mule running the latest Leopard beta and my trusty 12″ PowerBook G4 — revising text and making new screenshots for my Leopard book. I’ll finish Chapter 7 today and, with luck, start Chapter 9. (No, I’m not doing them in order.)

Tomorrow, I’ll check out of here at 7 AM and take my luggage — including my “portable office” — to the airport. By 8 AM, I hope to have my passenger on board for the flight to Phoenix. With cooperative weather (read that, “no headwinds”), I’ll be at my desk again by 1 PM, laying out the chapters I wrote in Page. Friday, I’ll be in my office all day.

Then, on Saturday, I pick up another photographer. He’s from Australia and he’s doing a coffee table book about Robinson helicopters. I’m one of his featured operators. I’ll fly him around for a few days, taking time to work on the Leopard book in early morning hours, before he’s awake. He leaves on Tuesday. Then I have two more days in my office before another helicopter gig at Lake Powell, Monument Valley, and Shiprock.

Anyone who thinks being a freelancer or owning a business is an easy living should walk in my shoes this month. It’s times like these that I think back with a bit of longing for those cubicle days, when I spent more time shooting the bull with co-workers than working long hours to meet deadlines and client needs.

But by mid-October, things should be back to normal. Until then, bear with me. On the priority scale, blogging has slipped behind a few more important tasks.

On Revisions

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At the halfway point of my Mac OS X book revision.

Yesterday, as I completed the revisions to Chapter 10, I reached the halfway point in my revision for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.

No, the book isn’t 20 chapters long. It’s 27 plus an appendix. I’ve revised 14 chapters. I’m not revising in order. I’m revising in the order I think it might be safe to revise in. Some features are still in flux and if I revise based on what I see, I’ll likely have to revise again.

And no, I can’t tell you what I think might be in flux. I’m under non-disclosure and I take that stuff pretty seriously. That’s also why you won’t find Leopard screenshots here (yet). And why I haven’t written any articles about the new features (yet).

This is a Deep Revision

I’ve settled into a pace of about one revised chapter per day. That might seem like a lot. It is, especially since I’m doing what I call a deep revision.

I not only write my Visual QuickStart Guides, but I also do layout for them. This is called packaging — the author provides final files to the publisher, who then (after editing, of course) sends them on to the printer.

I currently use InDesign CS3 for all my layout needs. But that’s not what I was using when I wrote the first edition of this book, which covered Mac OS 8, back in 1997. (I still remember that book’s release at Macworld Expo in Boston. Peachpit sold out on the first day of the show, but UPS was on strike and we couldn’t get any more books in.) In 1997, I was using PageMaker. And that’s what I used to create the original book files.

A revision is a revision. That means you start with something and modify it to bring it up to date. So each year, I’d start with the previous year’s file and modify text, replace screenshots, and make various other changes to bring the content and file up to date.

Every time I switched to a new version of my layout software — PageMaker became InDesign 2 which became InDesign CS which became InDesign CS3 — I can’t justify the expense of updating my software for every release — I’d simply convert the file to the new version at the beginning of the revision process.

Over the years, this led to inconsistently set up files. Sure, the differences were minor, but they were there. And it bugged me that there were tiny differences in the style definitions and that some text included indexing codes from a failed experiment with the indexing feature and that the Zapf Dingbats font applied to bullets wasn’t working right in all files. And that in some chapters, each page was a different InDesign “story” and in others, the stories would go on for several pages.

So this year I decided to clean up the files by recreating them all. I built a brand new template in InDesign CS3, adding the staggered tabs that many other VQS books include but mine never had. I took full advantage of InDesign’s nested style feature to automate bullet and reference formatting. I made my styles intelligent and highly functional.

Then I got an InDesign plugin that enabled me to export the individual stories in a single chapter file as one big story in plain old text. I do this for each chapter. I make sure the text has smart quotes and paste it into my template. I then manually reapply all the styles as I go through the text and edit it to bring it up to date.

Along the way, I reorganized much of the content to remove 2 chapters, add 5 chapters, and move a bunch of content around.

A deep revision.

Other Revisions

Contrast this with the last book revision I did. That was for another publisher which doesn’t allow author packaging. Instead, the book is submitted as a series of Microsoft Word files.

I start with the previous year’s “final” files. I turn on the revision feature so all my changes are marked — supposedly for the benefit of the copy editor, so she doesn’t re-edit the whole thing — and go at it. The result is a mess that only gets messier as the book goes through the editing process. In the end, it’s all cleaned up, laid out and sent to me as proofs so I can make any final corrections to it.

If the software I’m revising the book for hasn’t changed much, this can be incredibly quick — I can sometimes turn out 3-4 chapters in a day, with plenty of time for my morning coffee, blog entry, e-mail processing, and even a little Web surfing. My record was 2 weeks for the entire 400+ page book.

Time Is Not on my Side

But for a deep revision, things go much more slowly. If I’m lucky, I can turn out a chapter a day. That’s a complete 20-40 page chapter, laid out with dozens of screenshots — I’m averaging about 80 per chapter right now — and captions and even a few callouts.

I just did the math. If I can keep up a chapter a day as my production rate, I should have the whole thing done by September 20. Right?

Well, unfortunately, I don’t have the next 13 days to work on this book. Next Friday, I’m flying my helicopter at the Mohave County Fair, giving rides for the whole weekend. On Monday, I fly directly to Page for two separate flying gigs over Lake Powell. I should be back by Thursday afternoon. Then the Saturday right after that, I’m hosting a photographer/writer and pilot from Australia who are preparing a coffee table book about Robinson Helicopters, featuring about 20 operators all over the world. (Can you imagine that they picked me?) When they leave, I have a few days before I head back up to Lake Powell, Monument Valley, and Shiprock with the helicopter for a group of Russian photographers for a big photo excursion.

What does this tell me?

It’s 6:26 AM on a Friday morning. I’d better get to work.