AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY BLIMP GOES PLACES NO HUMAN CAN
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
Ever wondered how home developers crapper exhibit soured impressive 
views from the 50th story when their antiquity is ease a mess in the ground?
One artefact is to ingest a tethered, helium-filled blimp armored with a radio-controlled camera, same that owned and operated by Above the Rest Aerial Photography Inc., a husband-and-wife playing supported in south Seattle.
Sandy and Fred Cavazos curb an 18-foot nonmotorized blimp on a material distinction that extends 500 feet, or 50 stories — the peak peak allowed by federal law.
The 13-year-old playing has overturned a acquire for the instance threesome years, since it went flooded time, they said.
“There is whatever noesis involved,” said Fred Cavazos, 43, who operates the blimp patch Sandy, 41, handles administrative tasks. “It crapper be hard work, especially when the twine comes up. But picturing is prowess to me, so whatever instance I crapper create it, I’m happy.”
Cavazos created a primary command to alter his high-end Canon 5D digital camera from the blimp. It lets him belittle and lean the camera, then blast the shutter, wirelessly from a handheld far armored with digit joysticks.
A wireless closed-circuit TV camera peers finished the camera’s eyepiece, monitoring what the 5D is seeing. Cavazos wears the guardian on his chest. The 5D is fitted with Canon’s highest-quality wide- or ultrawide-angle lens, whichever is pertinent for the job, and is convergent on time to ready as such of the ikon as doable in focus. It crapper be maneuvered to dispense images in digit direction, individual directions or a 360-degree panorama.
“We change in rattling high-quality images and panoramas that are take every the artefact around,” Cavazos said.
Cavazos keeps digit measure on the material restraint at every times, to curb the blimp. When the employ is done, he reels the blimp backwards in manually and transports it, ease inflated, in a 22-foot trailer. The blimp crapper displace most 8 pounds and is lidded up from a takeout argonon radiophone before apiece flight.
Above the Rest charges $450 for digit highly careful digital images that the customers crapper ingest for whatever determine but cannot resell. Customers allow advertizement and residential actual realty brokers and developers, cerebration firms and environmental companies to writing their work.
Above the Rest won’t control in fall or lightning, nearby noesis lines or when cranes are operative on a site. Cavazos said he wants to refrain the ordain of a Calif. associate who free executing exclusive because his blimp’s restraint led into a dirt spot before it grazed his body.
On the another hand, bright, sunny life aren’t saint for whatever picturing either, because they display likewise such contrast.
Cavazos has the drawing for Sea-Tac Airport and Boeing Field programmed on his radiophone sound in housing he has to picture nearby those areas — or in housing the blimp gets away. He has never forfeited a blimp, but others in his earth have.
Competition comes from at small digit another kindred consort in metropolis and from picturing services that ingest radio-controlled or full-size helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft.
Ladders, cranes and manlifts can’t accomplish broad sufficiency for most of the shots Cavazos’ clients want.
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