Tag Archives: photography

Through the Magic of Photoshop…

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I get a photographic image of a helicopter that hasn’t been built yet.

Three-Niner-Lima in FlightMarketing is an important part of any business. And the most effective marketing includes visuals. Take, for example, my slides at the movie theater. There are a few aerial shots of the town and some cattle tanks, giving people an idea of what they can see from the air. But there’s also an excellent air-to-air photo of my old helicopter, Three-Niner-Lima. In the photo, I’m flying past Vulture Peak, just like I do on my Grand Tour of Wickenburg. It’s a real photo that Mike took from the passenger seat of a Piper Cub years ago, when we were flying in formation just to take the photos. I have several of these shots. One — the one you can clearly see me in the cockpit, looking at the camera — is on my business card. These photos look so good that I’ve been accused of cooking them up in Photoshop. But I didn’t. They’re real.

Three-Niner-Lima is gone now and I’m in a transition phase as far as the helicopter tour business goes. I’ve been getting calls for rides, but I have to tell callers that there won’t be any rides until mid-December, when the new helicopter arrives. In the meantime, I need to warm up my marketing machine. Christmas is coming and I usually do a nice business with gift certificates. I want to sell a bunch of rides now, so I have plenty to do when Zero-Mike-Lima arrives in town. I also want everyone to see what the new helicopter will look like. Lots of people thought Three-Niner-Lima was a kit helicopter because it was so small. They won’t think that they they see Zero-Mike-Lima. It’ll be considerably larger and more impressive.

The trouble is, Zero-Mike-Lima hasn’t been built yet. Just this week, it should have taken its place on the factory’s assembly line. But there certainly isn’t anything to take a picture of yet.

And I won’t have my hot little hands on its controls until December 8 at the earliest. That’s a bit too late for Christmas marketing.

So what was I to do? I thought about John Stonecipher. He runs Guidance Helicopters in Prescott, AZ, a flight school that also does tours and charter work. His R44 looks very much like mine would. Did he have some air-to-air photos I could use? I could use Photoshop to remove the N-Number (if visible) so it couldn’t be identified as his. I asked him and he said he did have some photos. He said he’d send them. I waited. And waited. And nagged. And waited. Finally, he sent a CD-ROM disc, probably just to get me to stop nagging him. There were three photos on it. None of them were suitable — they were blurry and the helicopter was too far away. I think when I do get my ship I should go up there and help him take some decent air-to-air photos of his.

So I wasted a month waiting for photos that wouldn’t do the job for me. Back to square one.

N45PG in FlightMeanwhile, I had a number of air-to-air photos of my friend Tristan’s R44 taken here in Wickenburg. I leased Tristan’s ship last year for the season and did relatively well with it. That’s what convinced me that I could build the business much better with a 4-seat helicopter. We’d taken the pictures for last year’s ad campaign: “Share the view with a friend or two!” Trouble is, Tristan’s ship is metallic gray with a dark blue stripe. My ship will be Ferrari red with no stripe.

Now I know that a knowledgeable person can work miracles with Photoshop. One of the things you can do is change the color of something. Unfortunately, I’m not a knowledgeable person. I use Photoshop to fine-tune the screenshots for my computer books, prepare photos and other images for the Web, and turn photographic images into computer-generated paintings for greeting cards. But I do know a Photoshop whiz. It was time to bother him.

Bert Monroy is another Peachpit author. He’s an artist and his specialty is Photoshop. He’s amazing — he can create, from scratch, photorealistic images. I have seen him do this at presentation. He blows me away.

N630ML NOTSo I sent Bert an e-mail with a thumbnail image of the photo I wanted him to convert and brief instructions. He said he’d do it, that I should just send him a bigger image. I sent the image with more complete instructions. I asked him to remove Tristan’s N-Number. I told him that if he wanted to get really fancy, he could add mine. The next day, the fruits of his labor arrived in my e-mail inbox. It was a photo of Tristan flying a helicopter that hadn’t been built yet.

I was incredibly excited. I couldn’t believe how good it looked. It looked real because it was real. The only thing he’d done is given Tristan’s helicopter a paint job and changed the N-Number.

I immediately started building my marketing materials.

Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 3

First was the series of slides for the local theater. The slides would be released one at a time, about 2-3 weeks apart. The last slide would take its place in the carrousel when the helicopter arrived in Wickenburg, before I had a chance to take new photos. I e-mailed the PowerPoint slide file to ColorMark (in Phoenix) and got their assurance that I could pick up the slides on Monday morning. (I have a meeting down in Scottsdale with the FAA that day.) The first of the new slides should make it into the carrousel on Friday. The next marketing item was a 4×6 postcard that would serve as a rack card until I could take new photos for a real rack card. It would also make a good insert for the WE event scheduled for November 19. I laid out the postcard in InDesign, then FTPed all of its files to SimplyPostcards.com, which prints 4-color postcards at a very reasonable price. I’m hoping to get those back within a week or so. Then I’ll be leaving them all over town.

On Monday, when I get back to the office, I’ll use Bert’s creation to modify a few of the photos on the Flying M Air Web site. And I’ll probably show it off on my own Web site, too.

After all, how often do you get a photo of something you’ve bought before it’s even built?

The Right Tool for Photo Shoots

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How we finally find the right camera for doing photo shoots.

When Mike and I first decided to start doing aerial photography, we went nuts looking for some good reference material to help us understand the best way to go about it. We finally wound up with a book called Secrets of Successful Aerial Photography.

This book was somewhat helpful in that it discussed photographic techniques. It also offered a piece of advice that I wish we’d ignored: It recommended the Pentax 67 camera.

The Pentax 67 is a medium format camera that is extremely heavy and quite expensive. We tracked a used one down at a camera shop in New Jersey and paid $1,500 for it. The camera had a built-in light meter, but did not have automatic exposure. That meant that the photographer had to adjust the shutter speed or aperture for every single shot.

Mike, my photographer, was lazy. He’d adjust the exposure once, then do the entire shoot with those settings. His logic was that since we were flying over the same area at the same time of day, the exposure didn’t need changing. What he didn’t take into consideration is that when you point north, south, east, or west, the light changes depending on the sun’s location — even when the sun is high in the sky. As a result, many of the shots were over or under exposed.

Mike decided to try shooting with his Nikon F2, which does have automatic exposure. The trouble with that is that Mike didn’t always capture exactly what the client wanted. As a result, photos needed to be cropped. Cropping 35mm images and enlarging them results in grainy photos. Although some of our clients didn’t seem to mind, it wasn’t the quality I wanted to offer.

My 2 megapixel Canon S300 was out for two reasons: first, it seemed to have trouble focusing in the featureless desert terrain we often shot. Second, cropping and enlarging photos resulted in pixelated shots. Not the quality I wanted to offer.

But a digital camera did offer one benefit — it saved money on film and processing. We could shoot dozens of images on one outing, delete the really bad ones, and prepare proofs on a color photo printer for our customers. It was quick and relatively cheap.

I decided that we needed to try a different digital camera and made a list of desired features:

  • Manual focus, so focus could be set to infinity
  • Shutter speed priority automatic exposure, so we could eliminate body shake and get good exposures
  • High resolution, so even cropped images could be enlarged without losing quality

We looked at several cameras that met these requirements. Unfortunately, they all offered lots of other features we didn’t need — and were priced accordingly.

We wound up with a Canon PowerShot G5 camera. This 5 megapixel camera has all the features we wanted — and a few others (like exposure bracketing) that help us get the job done right. Best of all, I used the photo printing feature of iPhoto to order a 16 x 20 enlargement of a photo I took with the camera and got back a clear, color-perfect image.

Know anyone who wants to buy a slightly used Pentax 67?

The House Surrounded by Wood

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About the simple photo shoot that took two tries (so far) to get right.

The client left a voicemail message, explaining that she wanted us to take an aerial photo of her house as a surprise Christmas present for her husband. She left a phone number, but I was afraid to call her back. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

She caught me in my office two days later. We met at the airport so I could take her deposit and learn more about the job.

She explained where the house was — less than a mile south of the airport — and described it as being surrounded by chopped wood. “You have to take the photo soon,” she urged. “Before all the wood is gone.”

She’d done her homework on the Flying M Air Web site, and knew all about the Pentax 67 camera with the big negatives. The one I’d just decided to sell because it was so difficult to use. She wanted us to use that camera because she wanted the photo blown up to a large print.

I took a $50 deposit and told her I’d call her when I had a contact sheet for her to look at, probably within a week. She told me to e-mail her, since her husband never looked at the computer.

Mike and I went up a few days later. We’d loaded the camera with 10 shots, but had decided to use half of them photographing Rancho de los Caballeros, in hopes of selling them a postcard. I flew for about 20 minutes. Mike took pictures. I had to climb to 5000+ feet for the photos of the ranch.

I dropped off the film at Safeway, requesting Kodak processing. The only kind of processing I could get for that kind of film. I noted that I wanted a contact sheet only. No sense in spending $20 on processing.

The contact sheet was a major disappointment. If the client wanted a great shot of her neighborhood, we could deliver. But a photo of just her house and all that wood? By the time we had it cropped enough, we would have been better off with the 35mm negatives.

I broke the news to Mike. He complained that the camera didn’t show the right thing through the viewfinder. I didn’t point out that the ranch photos came out okay. There didn’t seem to be a need to start an argument.

I e-mailed the client and explained the situation. I asked her to come to the airport and tell me which angle she liked best and to draw her property line on the best shot. She came in and looked at the contact sheet. “My house is one of those?” she asked. I assure her it was. Then I pointed it out. She picked an angle and I used a Sharpie to mark up the image. I told her we were switching to a 35mm camera, one my photographer was more accustomed to using. I told her he’d do a better job and she could still get her enlargement. I told her it was a “man thing.” She understood completely.

We went up today to try again. Mike loaded his Nikon with zoom lens with 24 exposures of 100 ASA Kodak print film. He shot about 10 of the house, 10 of the ranch, and 4 of the town. I dropped off the film at Osco, so I could pick up the prints tomorrow.

Let’s hope I don’t have to continue this tale in another blog entry.