From Drone Work to a Broader View of Place
When I started Northern Vista Droneworks, the obvious focus was the drone.
It was the tool that made the work possible, and it was the thing people understood immediately. Aerial photography. Video. Property imagery. Views that were difficult or impossible to create from the ground.
That is still part of what I do.
But over time, the drone has become less important to how I think about the work.
The real subject has become place.
The places where people live and work. The places communities gather. Landscapes that have shaped families and towns over generations. Businesses that are part of the character of a region. Properties that need to be understood, documented or preserved.
Sometimes the best way to approach those places is through a film.
Sometimes it is photography.
Sometimes it is an aerial map, a 3D model, thermal imaging or a detailed visual record that can help someone see what is happening across an entire property.
The technology has expanded, but the underlying idea has actually become simpler.
Tell the story of your place.
Understand your place.
Storytelling, with the drone in its proper place
I still love aerial imagery. There are things you can communicate from the air that simply cannot be expressed from eye level.
But a good story rarely comes from one perspective.
A community event might need aerial footage to establish where we are, ground photography to show the people who make it meaningful, historical material to provide context, and interviews or narration to connect one generation with another.
A business story might begin with a dramatic landscape and eventually come down to something as simple as a person doing their work well.
The drone becomes part of the vocabulary rather than the entire language.
That shift has led Northern Vista toward more community storytelling, historical work, tourism, local businesses and projects that document how a place is changing over time.
It has also pushed me toward work that is less about promotion and more about preservation.
Some places deserve to be marketed.
Others simply deserve to be remembered.
Often, they deserve both.
The other side of the work is technical
At the same time, drone technology has become much more useful than simply producing photographs and video.
Photogrammetry can turn hundreds of overlapping images into a detailed aerial map or three-dimensional representation of a site.
Thermal imaging can reveal patterns that cannot be seen with normal photography.
Repeat mapping can document construction progress, landscape changes, vegetation, drainage, maintenance needs and the condition of large properties over time.
That creates opportunities for golf courses, cemeteries, contractors, businesses, municipalities, conservation properties and larger private properties.
These capabilities are often presented as something that belongs exclusively to engineering firms, large aerial-data companies or national contractors.
They don't.
There is a place for those companies, particularly on large and highly specialized projects. But there are also many projects where a local organization or property owner simply needs someone nearby who understands the technology, understands the area, and can provide useful information without turning a modest project into a corporate procurement exercise.
That is an area where I think Northern Vista can be particularly useful.
What I mean by local first
“Local first” can sound like a slogan, but I mean something fairly practical by it.
I think work should stay within communities whenever it reasonably can.
Over the years, more industries have moved toward a model where a large company sells the project, someone far away manages it, and the actual work is passed to whichever contractor will accept the lowest rate.
The contractor may know nothing about the community, the client may never know who actually did the work, and the person doing it often has little reason or opportunity to care about what happens after the files are uploaded.
That model may be efficient on a spreadsheet.
It isn't always the best way to produce good work.
New Hampshire has photographers, pilots, builders, designers, technicians, tradespeople and small businesses capable of doing sophisticated work right here.
When possible, I'd rather see those people doing it.
That doesn't mean outsiders are unwelcome, and it isn't an argument against larger companies. There are plenty of situations where they are exactly what a project requires.
It simply means that local capability should not be overlooked just because technology has made it easy to buy services from somewhere else.
Someone who lives here already understands things that can take an outside company a long time to learn.
The character of the towns.
The roads.
The weather.
The seasonal changes.
The way people interact.
The fact that a cemetery, golf course, historic building or family property may mean considerably more to the people responsible for it than the acreage and coordinates suggest.
That knowledge matters.
Advanced capability can still be personal
One of the things I want Northern Vista to demonstrate is that sophisticated technology does not have to make a business impersonal.
A small company can produce detailed aerial mapping.
A local operator can use thermal imaging.
Photogrammetry and 3D modeling do not have to arrive inside a huge engineering contract.
And a technically complex project can still begin with a simple conversation between two people about what someone actually needs.
That is increasingly how I want to work.
Not by selling technology for its own sake.
Not by trying to make every project bigger than it needs to be.
And not by pretending the drone itself is the interesting part.
The interesting part is what we're trying to understand.
Or what we're trying to preserve.
Or what we're trying to say about a place.
Northern Vista Droneworks is still very much a drone company.
But I think it is becoming something a little broader than that.
A company about seeing places differently — sometimes to understand them better, and sometimes to help other people understand why they matter.
Comments