Hey Glenn!

[Scott Douglas]

You take pictures from airplanes, or used to, right?

Care to comment on this camera on auction on the GW site?

https://shopgoodwill.com/item/198587294

Says it's used for aerial photography.

[GH85Carrera]

Those are WW2 surplus cameras. When I worked at my last job, we had several of them, and tons of negatives the boss shot back in the 40s and 50s. They use a 5 inch wide roll of film, and good luck finding any. We had several dozen rolls that expired in the early 60s in the freezer. They were not used anymore. They had great lenses, and it is wonderful to scan one of those negatives on a photogrammetric scanner at 15 micron resolution. We had a 30x40 of downtown Oklahoma City in 1952 that was astonishing to people coming in the door.

They are cool toys, but pretty much a paperweight as finding film is gonna be tough.

We had a 9x9 film camera RC 30 made by Leica. It was the very pinnacle, bleeding edge film camera. It weighed 400 pounds, and required a Cessna 206 class of aircraft to carry it. 500 foot rolls of 9x9 film were $1,400 and our cost per exposure was $12 after the film processing. We paid $490,000 for it and it too is a paperweight.

The owner of the company died, and had put his idiot son in charge. He stripped all the assets of the company, and fired us, and threw out a huge archive of historical negatives of Oklahoma going back to the 1940s. Almost criminal actions, but they were his property so legal.

We started our company, and that idiot son firing us was the best thing that ever happened to me.
One of the other employees there and I started a company that now own a 2004 Cessna 182T with a Garman G-1000 glass cockpit. And a all digital camera that gets us better imagery than the 9x9 half million dollar camera. And we can have a clients product done in short order.

As yes, I am still in that business. We run it like a burger stand, and wait for clients to call us. Laid back and it is great to be the boss. I can take off as much time as I want. I can do business from my phone, from anywhere.


This is the lens for the RC-30. It was about 100 pounds itself. Amazing technology, and the film would move along to compensate for ground speed. It was called forward motion compensation.

[Zeke]

That is something else. Half a million in what year money?

[Steve Carlton]

Were you able to charge enough to amortize such expensive equipment and still make a reasonable profit? If you had it over again, would you do anything differently?

[GH85Carrera]

It was the mid 1990s when the company bought that camera. And yea, we did one project for an oil company that was $880,000K when delivered. So it was paid for quickly.

The camera we got was the third to last one ever made.

https://aerial-survey-base.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/RC30_Brochure_020326_LR.pdf

This is a link to more information about that system.

We had to send it to a company every 5 years to be cleaned and lubricated, and then to the USGS to be calibrated. That was right at 20 grand each time. The USGS issued a calibration table we supplied clients.
https://catalogue.data.wa.gov.au/dataset/aerial-imagery-camera-calibration-certificates/resource/a430dada-760a-44c3-ba08-2c15d96bc37d

The camera came with a visual view port that we never used. We ran ours from a laptop and a mapping grade GPS that cost us 20 grand. There was a little bitty weenie cable we had to pay 5 grand for to hook the GPS to the camera. The laptop read the GPS, and recorded the exact X- Y and Z position of the aircraft. It even knew the pitch and yaw.

We scanned the images on a 100K photogrammetric scanner. Each frame of film made a 1 GB tiff file. Many projects were hundreds to thousands of frames. They all had overlap both forward and side to side as we flew a pattern much like mowing the grass. With the overlap, we could generate 3D images. The operator had to sit for hours with polarized glasses that flickered on and off each eye and pick the points of each frame of film to make them all align into the 3D image.

It was all technology from WW2.

[GH85Carrera]

https://www.facebook.com/ACEOKC/
I can't believe it is still up, but this is the company I worked for. All the samples on that site are what we did. Now we can do even better, for less.

The idiot son has never updated that page. Ace Aerial is long gone.

[Scott Douglas]

I thought it was interesting that the camera on auction is located in the Central Oklahoma Goodwill store.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Steve Carlton

Were you able to charge enough to amortize such expensive equipment and still make a reasonable profit? If you had it over again, would you do anything differently?

If we got a call for us to shoot just a square mile of some property it was our minimum charge of $600. And that was just the image. If they wanted prints, it was more.

We flew all 709 square miles of Oklahoma County every couple of years for the county. They would use those images to look into all the county areas, and look for new pools, or a storage shed, and the tax man said bingo, more property taxes!

Now they just use Google Earth or Bing Earth to see it all for free. It is hard to compete with free.

[Steve Carlton]

What percentage of your business is lost to Google or Bing?

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by Steve Carlton

What percentage of your business is lost to Google or Bing?

I'm sure Glen is the one to answer, but Google maps is nothing compared to what I's seen from him. I think his images would show if the roses are in bloom.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Steve Carlton

What percentage of your business is lost to Google or Bing?

Impossible to tell. If a client just wants to look at an area, and not own the image, or makes a print, then the free stuff is great.

If you want to make an accurate print at a specific scale, and not have Google's watermark on it, you need to call an aerial company. And if you want one that is done very recently or on a specific date, you need to pay for a company to do it.

We fly all of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Arkansas. We have been to Florida several times. Heck we flew NASA's Cape Canaveral, at night with a sensitive and crazy expensive IR camera to find heat and water leaks on the roofs of the buildings. That was done for the company that owned the IR camera with a liquid nitrogen cooled IR camera. We flew it in daytime with regular RGB images, and at night with the IR camera.

Drones take all the small projects. Drone companies are often our regular customers. One guy in Denver Colorado, has several clients that are all in the flat part of Colorado spread over many miles. He would have to drive all day long and spend the night in a hotel to get them all. We can do it for him over a long day, flying from OKC.

One drone company got a project to fly out in Cimarron, county at the end of the Oklahoma panhandle, on the border of New Mexico. He realized he would have to get up early and drive most of the day, use dozens on batteries for the flight, and drive many hours home. We flew up and had it done cheaper for him. That job's hardest part was getting a surveyor to drive all the way up, and put down ground targets, and send us the precise XYZ positions.

We can read the target, and tell our computer what the value is and the image is precisely positioned on planet Earth. Then is is easy to derive elevation and position and even make contours. We sell that to the surveyor, and he puts his stamp on it, and double checks the data and calls it a map.

[GH85Carrera]

We had one client that is a surveyor in another state ask us to rent a Tremble GPS surveyors equipment. He was going to go to a site in Oklahoma, and put down targets for us. We flew it, and handed him many gigabytes of data and he went home and made his own map. While I had the Tremble, I recorded the positions of cracks in the concrete, sidewalk edges and other spots and got that data. My business partner flew it with his little drone at crazy high resolution.

I made a 3D AutoCad DWG vector point image of my property, with a photo background. Just for fun. I measured the sidewalks and how much edging I have to do, and could see the elevation of my house and make contour lines. As I never hired a surveyor, it is not a real map, but i don't care. I just wanted to do it to see it all.

[p911dad]

This is pretty amazing compared to what I used to do many years ago with a Cessna 172 and a Rapid Omega camera. I used to get business for shots of farms, etc with an ad in the American Agriculturist magazine, an upstate NY farm journal. It was basically a little business to pay for the airplane. I wish I could say I broke even, but you never really do with airplanes, always something more to eat the cash to keep it in the air.

[GH85Carrera]

Oblique photos are a real challenge to make profitable. We shoot mostly NADIR or straight down photos. We do shot oblique images, but they are not real profitable.

Our business comfortably pays the airplane payments, maintenance, hangar rent, and maintenance. And the airplane has increased in value. Bonus.