Idaho Airships, Inc.

Many folks believe that aerial photography pretty much involves being able to squeeze a camera into an aircraft cabin, then cruising around and pointing that camera at various things. After the work is done, the Aerial Photographer may just go out for a cruise in his Ferrari…or perhaps shop online for shoreline property on Lake Coeur d’ Alene.

After all…how hard can something like this really be?

Or this?

Everything is beautiful from the air, isn’t it? Even….dirt?!

These three images were all shot within about two hours of each other. That’s about all aerial photography involves, right?

Not.

I’ve posted an album of images shot in a single flight on 4/22/07: 18 of 207 images produced on that flight but are quite representative of the imaging assignments we encounter in our more routine operations. To view the collection, please visit our Gallery and navigate to Screen 3 (see the buttons along the bottom of the Gallery inset). The album is titled “Southwest Idaho 4/22/07.”

I won’t add captions to any of them since they’re self-explanatory. You’ve got your basic dirt, then some scraped dirt, some wet dirt, a roof, a bit of wild dirt, some grass, and then more wet and scraped dirt. If you’re into dirt-especially wet dirt, this is your moment.

In order to demonstrate what a typical documentary flight is like I’ve also posted a map of our entire 4/22/07 flight with a red track indicating our actual flight path, with markers to show where the images were taken. The arrows in the icons show the direction the camera was pointing. That map is posted here. We make between 2 and 3 such flights each week…in between the more glorious assignments.

Our flights are comprehensively recorded in a GPS unit and all pertinent data is included in the META data for each image. Each image is shot with a stabilized system, is over 120 Megabytes in size-each standard subject portfolio contains roughly 25 separate images, and the portfolios are often delivered within 24 hours of the flight (sometimes within 2 hours, and we have the ability to electronically transfer the images from the aircraft during the shoot).

The images are prepared within a fully calibrated process and they are pixel-sharp, even at over 120 Megabytes in size (thanks in part to our stabilized systems and thanks in part to having popped for the profe$$ional grade$ of len$e$). The quality of lensing is absolutely critical to image quality-not to downplay the importance of using professional grade cameras.

One last thing that keeps our ranks thin-it was very, very bumpy on 4/22/07. There’s nothing that will make you sick quite so fast as looking around through long lenses in “rough” air.

L