Flashback!

Jim Grey just posted about his experiences shooting an old (but new-to-him) Pentax ME 35mm SLR. He mentioned how small and light it is, and that's a fact. The Pentax ME and its successor, the ME Super, are so small and light that they were the main cameras we used when I worked at Sky-Shots back in '91.

Back before the days of RC drones and tiny high-res video cameras, this was the solution to get aerial photos up to two hundred feet from the ground.

Dangling from the bottom of the mini blimp was a film camera on a tilt-and-pan gimbal mount with a small CCTV camera affixed to the eyepiece and a servo to trip the shutter. A cable trailed from the blimp to the control console hung 'round the operator's neck on a padded yoke. The control panel had joysticks, a small black and white screen, and a shutter button.

This flyer was my first experiment in desktop publishing. I guess it was technically my first paid writing gig, too.

Here's 24 year old me with my boss's Pentax in my hands and my own Canon AE-1P over my shoulder, with a press pass doing photography at the 1992 First Union Grand Prix in Atlanta, watching some rookie cyclist named Lance Armstrong win his first big race.