It was over 50 years ago that the author made his first Monday with aerial photography. The occasion was right after the terrible floods 1955 in northwestern Connecticut. Since that time it has remained a steady source of income. So work is not hard and it produces a steady stream of income.
The author first went into this business over 50 years ago. It seemed that the accepted way of doing business then was to take the photographs first, and then try to sell them. It didn’t take too long for the author to realize that this was a fast way of going broke. After about the first year the author switched his tactics and went actively seeking customers.
It absolutely amazes me how well this worked we managed to get a list of clients that reads like the Fortune 500. It seemed that the larger the company the more willing they were to spend money on aerial photographs of their property. This included the top 10 companies on the Fortune 500 list, as well as hundreds of lesser clients. The lesser clients actually paid for most of the work that was done by the author.
Most of the assignments that the author developed were made by telephone. This included any number of real interesting clients. One of the clients that developed called me on the phone cold early on eight March morning. The author answered the phone and the voice on the other end inquired if he was home. Obviously he was or he would not of answered the phone. Once the person on the other end became aware that he was speaking to me he introduced himself over the phone with this, “Good morning my name is Stephen Spielberg.”
My answer to that was, “Yeah, well I’m the King of England.”
He assured me that he was indeed Steven Spielberg, and he needed some aerial photographs for the movie the Amistad. This was a movie about a cargo of slaves that took over a slave ship named the Amistad. As interesting as these assignments were, this was the kind of assignments I got. Over 50 years later I’m still getting assignments called in to me although I am no longer actively soliciting assignments.
One of the things that most people never believe even when they hear it is how much money there actually is in the aerial photography. Now we don’t do anything special in taking these photographs. We work with a single lens reflex 35mm camera. It is actually an Olympus IS-3. All of the photographs we take are obliques. We initially deliver to the customer 4 x 6 inch proofs. These are large enough for the customer to see what he is getting an order whatever additional prints he wants. Very rarely, do any of these prints exceed 11 x 14 inches in size. If the customer doesn’t want larger prints may have to tell me at the very beginning so that I can take the photographs with a camera that makes larger negatives. This camera is a Linhof Aerotechnika that takes a 6 x 7 mm negative. With a negative of this size you are able to enlarge the print to a much larger size. The largest photos we have ever made are 4 x 5 feet.
To take these photos we use both airplanes and helicopters. The ideal airplane is a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. The front seat window conveniently opens up, and swings up under the wing allowing you a clear shot of the site. The alternative when we are using a helicopter we take the passenger door off and just shoot out the open door.
With an airplane you are a limited to how close you can fly into the ground under normal circumstances the minimum altitude is 1000 feet, or over open countryside 500 feet. In practice however, we don’t like to use an airplane under 1000 feet. Any photographs that we have to take at lower altitudes are made using a helicopter.
With a helicopter you are legally able to come in at a lower altitude. This has many advantages when you are photographing small sites, but under most circumstances you are able to work with an airplane for a little over $100 an hour versus using a helicopter for about four times more.
In order to make this pay I tried a bunch the assignments together, so that I am taking more than one assignment per flight. I prefer having it leased for assignments or as many as eight per flight.
Aerial photography is a very interesting business, and you meet some of the most interesting people while doing business. One of the things that we don’t recommend doing though is trying to be both photographer and the pilot. You can’t do both jobs at once, and you should have a pilot along to fly a plane or helicopter while you are doing the photographs. This is from my own bitter experience many years ago where I did try it, and almost killed me.
John Angus Carter
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