THINK BEFORE YOU SHOOT

by Hank Silvia

Many of us tend to think of aerial photography as reducing three-dimensional space to a film strip of two dimensions. Sometimes it’s not quite that simple.

A few years ago I had a project to fly a low-level one-mile precision strip of imagery in Melbourne. The contract was time-sensitive, and the weather was not cooperating. It had been cloudy for a week, and the outlook was the same for another week.

One morning I was sitting in the cockpit of my high-tech, one-man digital photoship on the FIT Melbourne ramp. I had tried the previous day to go up and hover in the area for a possible short clear shot. No luck. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I could go broke using this method. The satellite imagery that I had just wasn’t good enough for me to predict the possibility of enough clear sky over the project area for a good shoot.

I wanted to tell my sad story to someone. My cell phone was wired into the headset, so from the cockpit of my airplane I called my friend Hank Brandli, Satellite Meteorologist, and began unloading my troubles.

Hank interrupted and suggested that we flashback and use today’s technology to guide me to a possible solution. He had done so for USAF pilots in Vietnam, carrying out all-important predictions of weather over assigned targets. He would analyze the cloud cover and direction and, based on his satellite view of the target areas, advise whether the bombing or photo recon missions should proceed or not.

No stranger to using today’s technology, I had adapted NASA and declassified intelligence technology to my one-man, high-tech digital photomapping business. Hank could use his sophisticated, at-home computer system and his adapted satellite receivers to analyze (in detail) and predict the location, size and direction of the :”holes” in the fast-moving cloud cover.

I sat in my cockpit on the ramp while Hank Brandli watched his satellites and calculated what was going on with the cloud cover. About an hour and a half later, Hank called on the cell phone and said:

“Take off in five minutes, and rendezvous with the hole in the clouds over Palm Bay, and travel with it, as it is heading right down your photo flightline path area.”

The rest is – until now – unrecorded history. I flew a perfect photo mission. The imagery was used in the design and layout of what is now the Melbourne Zoo.

9/26/2007