UAS News Podcast — 2013-12-04
Transcript
Alright, hello and welcome to the next installment of the UAS News Podcast series. Where we interview the newsmakers and discuss the news and applications relevant to the global unmanned technologies community. I am your program host, Patrick Egan, and as always, let's say a big warm welcome to our co-host, Mr. Gene Robison.
Gene. Hello all, how are you out there?
Doing well? Just hurdled one set of holidays and hurdling toward another. Well, you know, as long as you're keeping the nose out of the alfalfa, everything's okay. And so far.
So good. Anyway, so, you know, as we usually do, we discuss some of the news items that are, you know, been more prevalent and there are tons of them. And, you know, there's been a lot of, if people have been watching, there's been a lot of fallout, or not fallout, but I guess we want to talk about the Amazon's primary thing, your take on it, Gene. You know, there's even some backlash from that today.
I know that you were contacted, I was contacted as well as an analyst, if you will, to make comment on that. And I think it played exactly into where they want it to be, to be quite honest with you. It is. It's very topical.
The drone situation is ramping up. Everybody knows it. Everybody sees it coming. And if you're not on the bandwagon, you need to get on the bandwagon.
And Amazon may, you know, sell a couple of, you know, small items that, you know, look like drone aircraft. But to really get into the news, you need to be a user. And they jumped in with a big old splash, I think. Yeah, I, you know, the one piece that I just wrote about how we fell so far behind, which is getting tons of great feedback.
And one thing about the feedback, too, I think I'm always surprised who's reading the SUAS news. And when you get, start getting emails on stories, it's kind of interesting. But I think that Mr. Bezos, he's a genius because he's probably made more money with drones than most people will dream about in their lifetime.
I mean, that story is worldwide and it's just everybody's talking about it. So, you know, everybody's thinking about their Christmas purchases. I'm sure, oh, well, you know, Amazon, you know, I'm not going to get it this year by drone, but maybe, you know, a couple of years, which I think is a little bit of a pipe dream. It used to be the EOR on that one.
But after reading the roadmap, you read the roadmap, right, Gene? Oh, yeah, several times. I was concerned 2015. Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.
That should be another article coming out in Blomberg. I got to interview yesterday about the test sites and exactly the guy in Blomberg does financial news and they're really trying to figure out, they can't wrap their arms around how the test sites are going to make money. And I told them, I said, well, you're not the only guy trying to figure that one out. There's a lot of people trying to figure out how they're going to make money.
But I do think that the Amazon drone has done a lot for, has done so much for the community in the sense that, and I mean, it kind of coincides with what I was saying at the Swallow Man Systems Business Expo and my presentation about how if tech could take over as advocate prime for this technology, I think most of the, let's say, trepidations that people have or misconceptions about this being military technology would go away. And I think that the Amazon primary drone is doing that because everybody's talking about how cool it is.
Nobody's really talking about the privacy. Some people are, you know, the fringe. You sort of have the fringe people out there who are afraid of it dropping off CDs and DVDs, but by and large most people think it's cool. And for some reason, people really trust internet and technology companies with personal data, you know, and things about them.
So I hats off to Mr. Bezos. I think he did a great job. And I did say in my interview that I thought that Google and the rest of us will be right hot on their heels.
Maybe did you see that article this morning, Gene, about Google robots running out of the car? Of course. Yeah, a day late, a dollar short on that one, Google. You kind of got scooped on that one.
But I think it's good. I think that, you know, we're moving forward. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was that one story, the how do we fall so far behind if you haven't seen it. You should go to the S.U.S.
News website and check it out. There's some graphics on there, how this thing's working, where we are, why we're here. I'm hearing from a wide cross section of the community and people are saying, wow, you know, this really kind of, you know, draws or lets it connect the dots. The second graphic I thought might be a little over the top with a little vulture on there, but people seem to like the vulture.
What did you think of vulture, Gene? I kind of liked it myself. They've gotten to the point where they don't even have to go out and kill anything, you just get fed to them. Exactly.
That was kind of the point of using it. But a good example of where we're at and how we got here, what's going on. The other thing is we did like a soft launch of Drone TV, but we have officially launched Drone TV. I know the story is on the S.U.S.
News homepage, but you can go visit it and watch it on our YouTube channel. The first episode, you know, you're in that, Gene, or mention of you is in that. It's with Maha and Jeff Calderon and it's about the civilian drone movie, which if you haven't seen that, you should go watch that. It's a good movie about search and rescue and our humble co-host is one of the people featured in that film.
So if you haven't seen that, you want to go see that. Have you watched the inaugural episode of Drone TV, Gene?
You know, I have and as I sat and watched it and you all kind of talked about me, I kind of felt like a soul dove at a tent revival there, you know, because I felt like I was doing something wrong, but everybody liked it, you know. So it was a little uncomfortable, but I thought it was well put together and produced and I think it's going to be another good outlet for us to get good information out to the Internet population and the people that we have watching at S.U.S. News and listening with podcasts.
Well, you know, it's another, it's definitely another vehicle for people to get their information. A lot of people really responded well to the civilian drone movie and I get tons and tons of feedback from that. And so I mean, you know, a lot of people like to watch videos. So videos just another format for us.
The production, you know, we were going to launch the Drone TV earlier and we were doing it over Google Plus, but man, it just, it just, it just stunk. I just, it just wasn't professional enough for a, let's say an industry. I mean, that's the magic people kind of beat me up all the time. Oh, you're wearing a tie and you look stiff.
Well, I'm trying to add professionalism to a profession, you know, where we are trying to portray a professional industry. And I think that, you know, the community kind of deserves it. So I was hoping for something with more production quality, something more professional. And actually the, the colder rooms were very nice in assisting us and making that happen.
But I hope everyone checks that out and enjoys it. We have some other ones coming. We're actually, or we're not beating up on the FAA or anybody. It's, we're going to do some educational.
We have an educational one that I'm really looking forward to. We were out at the airport and kind of took some footage of what it looks like out of the cockpit of an airplane for people in this community who don't really get that. We're moving into an occupied space. And so you'll kind of get the perspective of what you're looking at outside of the aircraft and it stars the Cracker Barrel, the infamous Cracker Barrel.
And I'm out there and I'm out at about two seconds before impact. I go out there and then I come in to about a second before impact and then I come right up into the windshield and I have it in my hand. I'm out flying it. I didn't want to buy a new windshield.
But the idea with that is you get kind of an idea of what a pilot in a manned aircraft can see and hopefully act as a little bit of an educational thing for people who are on the ground flying and maybe get a better understanding of the space that you're going into. I'm kind of excited about that. We also have another one in the can and we'll bring those out. There's other stuff for the future.
We need to find some advertisers for that. The production of video is not cheap. I can say that without reservation. Yep.
So go over there and check that out. Anything else catch your attention this week, Gene?
Well, I was going to jump on the drone TV thing too. As I mentioned, I did see it and I think it's just a fantastic next step. Or yes you asked me. I mean just really taking with the production quality of it.
I'd like to say the call drones are professional at it. And I think it's going to be a great success. I mean that's been kind of forefront since I watched the first issue last night. Well, you know, and we originally came up with the idea, it's in the story, to try and do some PSAs loosely based on my TikToks like this is my drone.
More for the consumption of let's say the general public. I mean I think for a lot of it's an effort, a lot of it is kind of we circle the wagons or preach to the choir or whatever. What we really need to do is go out there and talk to the general public and say, hey, this is what we want to do. We don't want to launch missiles at you.
We kind of want to find missing people or do farming or do art or whatever. I hope to do that in the future. So we'll see in my spare time what we can pull out of that. This is I'm sure you're not busy either.
Well, you know, the only thing that I'm concerned with Patrick is that I don't own the tie. Well, we're going to have to. We'll get you one of those bolo deals with the Scorpion. That's a long one.
Maybe. OK, yeah, that works. That works. We'll get you that.
It's a nice dress cowboy hat. That will work. All right. That's good.
OK, so let's, you know, let's bring on our first guest. Our first guest is Mr. Paul Boss and he's the associate professor at Smith College. He's into engineering.
He does a whole bunch of stuff. But we kind of brought him on here because he wrote an op-ed piece for IEE spectrum. So before we go on, Paul, could you introduce yourself to the audience and a little bio of how you got involved with the unmanned aircraft systems?
OK, topic. Sure. Yeah. And first, thank you for having me on your show.
It's very interesting work you're doing. My background is in engineering and atmospheric science. I have been involved in graduate school with the ER2 program and then later with very small balloons that we've developed. So altitude control things about the size of a half the size of a weather balloon and mailed these all around the world right now.
I do science by FedEx. We're actually mailing somehow to Antarctica in a week or so. And we're doing a big campaign in the Amazon. And these are not unmanned aircrafts, but a lot of electronics and communications and stuff are similar.
So it's a really interesting world. So I've been involved in that for a while. As far as I know, they're the world's smallest controllable object that you can send and get data from. We don't do any photography and things like that, so there's not these privacy concerns.
We're just taking meteorological data essentially, but it's fascinating stuff. And I have gotten really interested in the airspace issue. I've been involved with model aircraft all my life. I teach fluid mechanics.
I think flight is beautiful and intrinsically and useful. And that's the same reasons that you do that this technology has a lot of promise. I've gotten very interested in the policy side of things because of the severe restrictions on academic freedom and academic research with anything in the air. Literally down to the size of a paper airplane is technically not legal to fly outdoors if we're using it for teaching and research.
This is a really troubling development. I think like all of us, I grew up in a country that was sort of more free. It's a different world we're living in here. So I've spent a lot of time for the last few years reading Supreme Court cases and looking at the history of our airspace.
It's a fascinating story that I feel like everyone needs to know, even remotely involved in this UAS policy debate. We need to know the foundation and then build on that. And I think I feel like we've been going ahead without any reference to where we've come from. So there's the brief outline.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, you hit on a lot of topics there that make sense. Now, the weather balloon thing, let's start there because I was kind of early on. How long have you been doing that?
Since about 2004, our first flight. It developed a very simple and highly efficient means of altitude patrols are the foundation of that. We got a patent on that and have since been building on that technology. Most of my work right now is electronics programming.
It's fascinating that I had to learn how to make certain words and everything. So we're just pounding the way down to get these things so that they're small and safe enough that we can continue to operate in the airspace. And honestly, I'm super cautious about this. We tend to do our flights in extremely remote regions, and that's really where my research is going.
The Arctic, the Amazon, very little activity in the United States. And when we do that, it's just far away. It's far away from people who possibly can. And so this altitude control thing, have you seen the Google effort for the Loon project?
Yes, I'm well aware of that. They had a lot of interest in our technology, and I guess that's all I can say about it right now. Okay, because I had talked to them, and they're down here in Silicon Valley. They were like, oh, this is a moonshot.
Man, nobody's ever done anything like this. I'm like, hmm, okay, we'll leave it at that. My sense is that there's a lot of issues with international overflights and relatively heavy payloads. The balloons that I fly are 160-gram payloads.
These are tiny, tiny things. When you talk about foot-navigate weight and the number of them that they're talking, putting over populated areas and stuff, I think it really could lead to changes in the airspace law for balloons. The caution lights are correct, and they need to proceed with caution. These heavy things, it doesn't take much to take out a windshield of an aircraft going 500 miles an hour.
I have a lot of concern with how high schools and other folks are sending balloons up willy-nilly with teddy bears attached to them and cameras. I think that's an area where the FAA has to be more cautious than they're being right now. Oh, look at this guy. He's begging for regulation over here.
No, I'm just saying, I don't see an incident. Honestly, it's a big – here's an interesting thing to touch on real quick. It's a big sky. There's 70,000 weather balloons launched every year in the United States, 600,000 worldwide.
Those are going up in the air traffic lanes, and there hasn't been a collision yet. There will be sometime. I think the odds just stack up, but the benefit has been so extraordinary for weather forecasting and everything else, and the balloons were obviously here at first, so there's those legal issues. But it's a big sky, and I think this has some relevance to the FAA debate on UAS in terms of especially the low altitude flights, below 400 feet.
When you see the FAA's now – but I don't want to pick on the FAA. They have a tremendous job ahead of them. They are pressured from all different angles, but there's a figure that keeps coming up that shows the U.S. airspace.
We're all familiar with this. It's basically lit up bright with aircraft and showing how busy the airspace is, and I think we all need to recognize that on those graphics like that, the aircraft are 500,000 times, half a million times increased in their size, so they're distorted to be blown up, not necessarily intentionally, but it gives the wrong impression. Then they're all compressed into one layer, as if all the aircraft were flying at the same altitude. It's an enormously deceptive graphic in terms of what the real situation is.
Any one of us in most areas where we live can walk outdoors and look up in the sky and maybe count one aircraft in the whole sky, unless you live in New York City or something. I think we have to be realistic about the real risk of a farmer flying something at 100 feet above his land. We don't have realism to feed it. Yeah, but it's a lot easier.
I've found in my experience here, it's just a lot easier to go, no, no, and that's just easier. Now, the one other thing we did talk about or you did touch on was the farmer. Oh, these farmers now can fly RC over their fields. To me, nothing new.
Is that you? Sorry. No, go ahead. It's a small step in the right direction.
I think that just so your audience knows, there was an announcement, I think it was about a week ago, came out in Oklahoma, Channel 9 News of all places, that they claimed to have an exclusive statement from the FAA that says farmers in use operate on manned aircraft over their own property for personal use. And that was remarkable. As you'll see, I think we need to get into the airspace issue, but I see that as remarkable because it acknowledges that landowners have some claim to the airspace in relation to use and enjoyment of the land.
The word landowner is in there. You can imagine farmers aren't just flying this for recreation. I think the FAA knows that. And I think it's a step in the right direction.
It's a small step, but it's a step. Well, I see it as a bigger thing, really, because farmers have always been able to fly RC over their fields. But I see it as, I mean, I see it working for universities, too. Now, here, I'm close to UC Davis.
They own a lot of land and have forming experiments going on, whatever else. They should be able to fly RC. We do, too. It's a big deal, actually, I think.
It is, and I think it should give, let's say, a wider, it can't just be farmers. That's how I see it. It shouldn't just be farmers. I mean, if you can, for your own use, it's almost like when they say business use of GA aircraft, I kind of see it the same way.
If you're not actually commercially making money with it, then is it really a commercial operation, and do you need a commercial pilot's license? So if I was at the universities, I'd be pressing on that. Hey, we're the same model as the farmer right here. We already are, and a number of universities are.
And even before this, I think there's a movement to sort of re-accord our ability to use our campus airspace. You can't use the air an inch above the ground. It's really a very serious infringement on academic freedom. And teaching, especially in engineering and science.
So there's quite a bit of movement in that direction. Yeah. Yeah, it's an end-range for science. Yeah.
If you look at it, even the FAA said that businesses, that manufacturer-owned aircraft have the ability to go out and test fly and do R&D. And that's not completely commercial because it's not a direct sale. I don't know what their logic is behind that. But even commercially, there is some outlet there, and there's no reason why academia shouldn't get the same thing.
Yeah, absolutely. You have to realize that these, one thing to remind people of is that these model aircraft are nothing new. Since 1930s, there have been radio-controlled aircraft that are every bit as smart, more menacing than what we see today in terms of gas motors and more power and heavier. And some of the little styrofoam things today that have very reliable communications and little electric motors and things.
This technology's been around for a long time. And whether you call it a model aircraft or an unmanned aircraft, the similarities are, as the FAA has well acknowledged, they're really hard to distinguish. They're essentially the same technology, sort of rebranded and renamed with some more sensors and things like that on it. But fundamentally, it's not really that different.
And I guess, this technology's been used safely in the United States for many, many decades. And with very, very few incidents. I think moving in the direction that the FAA appears to be is a really smart move in the right direction. It relieves some of the pressure of micromanage, some of this really little stuff, that they can then focus on the really serious issues up above 400 feet and where stuff is a serious issue, a collision with an aircraft or other things that they need the resources up there.
Well, I mean, it's interesting that you said that because we've been going for an exemption for years for under four-pound aircraft, certain parameters, frangible, all the rest of that. And if really people, if that was available, people would gravitate towards that if it was less restricted. Let's say you didn't need a commercial pilot's license and stuff like that. But it goes back to, I don't really think that when the FAA stepped on this landmine, I don't think they really realized what they were getting into.
And I still don't think that they did. You mean the farmers?
No, just the farmers with this whole technology in general. And that's something I'd love to comment on if you don't mind. I'd like to give a very brief overview of sort of where we came from because that's the most interesting story to me. So if you take a look back in history, not very far, in fact, when my grandfather was alive, the property owners very clearly in the common law owned the airspace, the public property, and it went ad quillum, meaning to the heavens.
You owned the box. And that meant that people couldn't shoot a bullet across your property without a sort of trespass, and or could they run telephone wires over your property, even if it doesn't touch the land. So this ad quillum doctrine is written into our landscape. Every time you see telephone wires going down the main streets and not cutting diagonally over people's lots, it's a signature of this ownership of the airspace.
And it became, with the K-Hawk flight, the Wright brothers, in 1903, it opened up a huge can of worms. Were these aircraft trespassing or were they merely using the public airspace?
And it took a long time to resolve that issue in the United States. Europe was much quicker. They were free to just sort of declare all the airspace public. But in the United States, we have the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which created a really legal, thorny mess.
And it took until 1926 to, so you think almost a quarter of a century, to come up with the federal laws. And this was the Air Commerce Act of 1926. Interesting side note is that was signed by and sort of facilitated by Calvin Coolidge, who is the former mayor of my town, city councilor here, and then went on to become the president. And he developed this deft compromise between landowners who previously owned all the airspace and the aviation industry, which is what we have today.
It's basically a law. The Air Commerce Act basically reads exactly like the statutes today. It says above the minimum safe altitude, the flight is a public highway essentially, and below that is essentially the remnant of Madhue, what landowners owned. And this view has been reinforced again and again by the courts.
Everyone who's interested in this should read USD Cosby, which is the seminal 1946 case. But the language in the air is really strong. The landowner owns the airspace near the ground and has, you know, quote, exclusive control over that airspace and above that is the public highway. And the Supreme Court in 1946 went so far as to say that, you know, if that agency, meaning today's FAA, then it was the Department of Commerce.
But if the agency had said 83 feet was the minimum safe altitude, the Supreme Court said we would have a problem with the regulations. And so this has been reiterated a number of times. Florida versus Riley is another huge one that everyone should read. A lot of concern about public rate of transit extending below 400 feet from all the justices and even saying 400 feet was too low, three of the dissenting justices.
So this theme from Air Commerce Act of 1926 through USD Cosby, through Riley, all the way through 2005 through a Pegasus Air case really acknowledges that there's some ownership of the low-remote airspace. And so when we have a policy statement as came out in 2007 that, you know, landowners can't fly a paper airplane in their backyard unless they get an FAA approval, you know, if it's for commercial or non-recreational use, that really goes counter to centuries of legal precedent. And I'm not a lawyer, but I've read plenty about this to know that there's some big issues here.
And as I see, this is actually our salvation in this country and that we, and this is the way that I see the FAA moving with the acknowledgement that farmers have the right to use the airspace, even if it's a past-of-date acknowledgement, there is the potential for, you know, a vast pressure relief in terms of allowing some of this technology to be used with very small stuff at low altitudes, line of sight, over private property where you're not snooping on your neighbors
and agriculture and other things locally controlled, meaning that, you know, the towns and cities can say what's appropriate in that region and to have a vastly more dynamic and interesting market than the stagnation we've seen the last five or six years.
And so, you know, I'm really hopeful that we're moving in that direction, basically where people are starting to realize the United States is unique and our Constitution affords, you know, it's going to mean there's a unique solution to this problem in the United States that's not the same as some of the rest of the world where, you know, everything is public airspace down to the grass. So, yeah, so it's just a fascinating story and it deserves a lot of our attention because there's so many benefits, I think.
I'll just say one. I mean, for the industry, you know, if you have this, essentially the word is a segregated airspace where below 400 feet is, you know, landowners have some control over and above that is clearly a public highway. And that's what we've had. That's nothing new.
That's what we've had since, you know, 1926. And if we have this segregated airspace, we have a lot of markets that can take off like the farmers' low altitude, very small stuff over their own land that are not menacing aircraft. And then above 400 feet, we can have all the dreams of the bigger folks who want to have, you know, very highly regulated long distance stuff, higher altitude. So I do this kind of an optimistic scenario where we might have two markets instead of one and vastly more activity in the United States than we've had in the last decade.
I would agree with that. I think they're really going to have to do something where there's a lightly regulated group or there's just no way they're going to be able to handle the traffic or I mean, there's a couple of scenarios where they could. But anyway, it's all very interesting. You know, do you have a website where you're talking about some of the problems?
You know, I know we did at a point that I really want to, the tone has got to be just right because I have tremendous respect for the folks at the FAA and what they're trying to do and all the pressures that they're under. And so, you know, putting stuff out that's critical of that, I just, you know, I think I'm struggling with how to say it in the right tone. And I think folks at the FAA, hopefully they're listening to this
and really thinking about some of these issues because I think there's a chance of having, you know, some very safe activities happening down near the ground and safe and regulatory effort for the much more serious stuff happening above 400 feet and, you know, over other people's property.
You know, the Amazon thing, for example, is a crazy idea, right? And a lot of people I've heard from, you know, thought, hey, this is really cool, but I'm not sure I want that thing flying 50 feet over my backyard to deliver my neighbor's package. That's just not the world I want to live in. And so I think having some acknowledgement that something like Amazon would need to be above 400 feet and you'd need to check the box if it was going to come down in your property, you need to sign on.
That's what you are agreeing to. But that stuff I don't think should be flying willy-nilly everywhere without landowners having phone control near the ground, as we always have. All right. I hope there's some interesting insight there.
Now, we're going to move into segment two here and bring on our next guest, and you can hang out if you like if you've got time. But we're going to bring Terry and Belinda Kilby, authors of the Drone Art Baltimore photography book and owners of Elevated Elements. Are you guys still there?
Or did you drop off? We're here. We're here. Hello.
Waiting so patiently. You know, maybe you guys can give us a – I mean, we met at D.A.R.C., the Drone and Robotics Conference in New York City, and you guys gave me a copy of your book, your beautiful photography book. But maybe you guys could do a little bio about yourselves, how you got into unmanned aircraft and aerial photography and start with Terry, and then we'll move on to Belinda. Sure.
Well, first of all, thanks for having us on, Patrick. Sure. We recently got married. Well, I guess to go back for Belinda and I have known each other for many, many years.
We grew up together, went to school together and everything, and just about five years ago, we actually, after I relocated back to Baltimore, got romantically involved and were married a couple years ago. And during that process of kind of combining bodies, we started to, like most other people out there who get married, started to combine super pastimes and passions and backgrounds. And I grew up as an R.C. enthusiast.
I built countless R.C. cars, planes, boats, you name it, and somehow or another I flew it and crashed it or what have you. And I'm also a software engineer during the day, specializing in mobile technology, primarily iPhone and Android devices. So when we started to combine some of our past interests, the R.C.
thing came up, and Belinda has always been a visual artist. And I guess German photographers are what you come up with when you combine a tech person and a visual arts person. And I'll let Belinda add on to that some. Yeah, I witnessed Harry getting involved with building some of the R.C.
Just being a tinkerer with R.C. stuff, and then he put a little tiny camera, the dumb stick camera is what they call it. She's a few grams on one of the store-bought R.C. teleprompters.
And it was just awful footage, of course, but having an art background, I saw the connection with some other important art movements from the past like Got any prints and impressionism, Staple tasks, among others, Staple tasks, aerial perspective going on for Zagu. And so I saw that there was a lot of potential to create something really exciting and fresh and unique while also embracing new technology. So it was just really the novelty of having combined traditional fine art and new technology. I'm a little bit scared.
Okay. Well, before we go too far on this, usually I ask people to say they have a website after. But I think in this case, if you guess people are listening or as they're listening to this, they could pull up the website. You guys, could you give us the website address?
Sure. It's elevatedelement.com. Okay. And we have photos and copies of the book and everything up there.
Yeah. So people can kind of get an idea of the work that you're doing as we're talking about this. So yeah, we met at D.A.R.K.E. He gave me a copy of the book.
I looked through this. I don't have it on my coffee table because I don't have a coffee table. But I have it on my desk, which is just kind of... Give it back.
Exactly. And it's not really a coffee table, but it's pretty messy. But anyway, that's either here or there. I did, you know, some of the pictures stuck out to me and some people don't have the book.
But on page 32 and 33, you've got Brewer's Hill here. And I really kind of liked that photograph. I kind of liked the cityscape in that one and in the signage with the guy with the... I guess that was a...
What kind of beer, what brand of beer was that? That was Ash. National Bohemian Beer, which was kind of the unofficial logo of Baltimore, if you will. Many, many moons ago, National Bohemian Brewery was located here in Baltimore, at least sometime in the 60s, early 70s, possibly.
They relocated. They were bought up. As many breweries have happened, they were bought out by a larger company. And I think it was actually brewed up in West somewhere for a long time.
But it's kind of an unofficial icon of Baltimore. Everywhere you go, you see Mr. Bowe everywhere kind of smiling. He's even been adopted into some of the logos of local restaurants and breweries and things like that here in the area.
Well, not only as a... Oh, sorry. As an interesting perspective to the cityscape. Absolutely.
One thing to point out about that shot is that that was really considered just a test shot at first. It was done with an early edition GoPro camera, which wasn't the highest resolution. And it kind of came out with a little bit of a dirty, gritty feel to it. And after speaking with some people about it, that's kind of the image that Baltimore puts out for a lot of people.
And everybody seemed to expect that image at that point. And we decided to not reshoot it in the interest of keeping that quality to the photograph. Everybody just kind of seemed to prefer it that way. So we left it.
Well, I can see some of the other subjects of the photograph or the subjects in the book in that photo. So it's pretty interesting. And I'm looking at it right now. You can hear the pages.
There's a little bit of... Yeah. ...beard or the mind. Go ahead. I think that's something that really appeals about that particular photo and the quality that sticks out for me and some of my favorites is anything that really lends itself with a mysterious kind of quality or a surreal kind of feel to it where you can kind of let your imagination take flight along with what you see there in the subject.
Right. Yeah. So yeah, there's just a whole feel and a tone. And that's something else that we've also learned is that no matter what camera you use, you can really play into the qualities that that equipment will produce for you.
So even though we have evolved our fleets and we have better equipment and we've been learning as we go and we're capable of doing better quality quote unquote type of images, we still are able to appreciate some of that feel that you get with some of the smaller type of models, the GoPros and the lighter kind of cameras as well. Right. So you can really get good stuff even if you're at entry level. Exactly.
And I think one of the things that I've always liked about this low altitude aerial photography is it's kind of something that your mind can picture your head being there. And I think that that also really kind of comes through in the photograph on page 41, Water Taxi. And to me, I look at the photo and it's really not so much about the water taxi as it is the flag. You know, you've got the stars and bars and how it's furled in the wind and then the contrast of the field.
It really speaks to me, you know, kind of evokes a kind of a patriotic emotion in the flag. And, you know, any good art is born of emotion. So I can kind of see that here. And, you know, again, the title is maybe not the same, but different photos speak to different people in different ways.
And I think throughout the book that notion that I just talked about about the low altitude aerial photography and being able to kind of conceptualize that in your mind really works and is present throughout the book. I'm impressed with that. A little known fact about that particular shot is it was actually captured on Flag Day too. So it kind of went out on Flag Day.
And when we got in there that evening, we looked and 90 percent of the shots we had contained a flag somewhere. That's good. Of course, fortuitous. But it's a nice thing.
Now, so, you know, I know that, you know, from my own experience of doing aerial photography that you can capture a lot of photos. And sometimes it's hard weeding through there to pick out your favorites. But maybe you guys could tell us what the way either one of you is your favorites or your favorite shot. I'll start with this one.
Go ahead, Melinda. Oh, okay. Wow. The more we spend time with them, they all are loved and important to us.
But gosh, I guess coming from an educational kind of background for myself, being an art teacher in Baltimore City for the last 10 years, I really enjoyed looking at the Park School photo. And if you have the book there, whoever does, then it's on page 58. But there were 1,100 students that spelled out the word park. And the math department of that school, they took the time to, the students, to grid out and know exactly how much area would be needed in each block letter to accommodate.
And they had the younger kids in the front row, the older kids in the back row. So knowing that we're going to be at an angle, not directly over the people, but off to the side, then it really enabled us to capture something really special and perspective-wise still look right. So there was a lot of planning that went into that shot for literally five minutes of execution. So pretty cool.
It's cool to have that participatory story. And then Terry, for you, which photo was your favorite?
You know, I think you and I have a very similar case. One of my favorites is absolutely the Brewer's Hill shot, Mr. Bell. Again, he's just such an icon, such a big part of the culture that is Baltimore.
And to see him looking out over the city from that perspective, it's something that you simply can't see any other way because I'm sure you're not familiar with the area, but there are no buildings that you could potentially get that shot from around there. That is by far the tallest building in that neighborhood, and there's nothing anywhere close to that that you could even zoom in with a large telephoto or anything along those lines. So it's definitely one of my favorites. Well, it was nice work.
And you guys, just briefly, you just talked maybe of working on another book. Yeah, we're still trying to weed through possible subjects right now. You know, we've talked about possibly doing other cities in the U.S. We've also talked about possibly visiting the country and maybe doing a book of ancient ruins throughout South America and Mexico, things of that nature, mine ruins, things of that.
But there are still quite a few things on the table right now, so we haven't really officially made up our minds yet, but you'll be one of the first people to know when we start. All right, I appreciate it. We're going to have to make it all. Well, go ahead.
You want me to go? No, I was just going to say it's definitely a goal, but we're focusing on promoting and getting the word out about our first book, Dreadnought's Vault of War. And then, Terry is real active with designing and getting into some manufacturing of his latest design, which is more of a hybrid-style quadcopter where he can not only get some nice photographic stills, but also have a more actual type of flight where we can get into a little bit of video as well. So we're excited about that.
All right, well, that sounds good. And I appreciate you guys coming on. And also my thanks to Paul Boss. Thanks, Paul, if you're still here.
You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be on here and fascinating to hear about the aerial photography. It's great stuff. Thanks, Paul.
What we're trying to do here is give everybody that different perspective. Gene, you were kind of quiet. I didn't let you even in here tell dad about that. Well, no, actually I'm on the website looking at the portfolio, and I think the picture that you spoke of, Patrick, is number 18.
I'm looking at the bridge of fan now. You guys do some fantastic work. It's beautiful. So if the folks that are out there on the podcast want to see examples of it, I would love to see something like that in huge print.
But they need to go look at your website because you do some really nice work. Website one more time. Appreciate it. It's elevatedelements.com, and I'd also like to point out that the book Drone Art Baltimore is available on Amazon right now.
Hey, now that would be, you know, if you could get your drone art book delivered by drone. Absolutely. All right, everybody. Not that Amazon needs any more plugs at this point, but.
Well, the drone art book does. So, you know, hopefully we can piggyback on that. All right, thanks, everyone, and we'll talk to everyone next week. Okay.
Thanks. Great. Thank you. Thank you.