Welcome To The Family | New Multirotor | Aerial Video & Photo
Making Changes
Things have been a bit quiet around here lately and that's because we're busy working on a ton of different projects. We have a lot of things we're going to be wrapping up here soon and we can't wait to share those with you. In time, we'll have a lot of cool stuff to share. For now, though, we're kind of in a lull until we get these projects tied up. If you didn't know this already, in 3.5-4 short months we will be embarking on our new journey in Hawaii. We'll be living in Hawaii for 4 years, and we've been trying to decide what will help our business grow while we're there. Then, one day we got a really awesome opportunity.
A New Friend With 8 Motors
I'm sure you know that we have a hexacopter. It's been on the blog a few times, and we talk about it quite often. We love being able to use it, but the biggest downfall with it is that we cannot lift heavy cameras with it. That means we can only use our GoPro on it. The footage/images we get from the GoPro is great, but it's not the same as what comes from our DSLRs. The setups we were looking at upgrading to was $12,000 and up. We didn't have that kind of money just to put into something that we weren't really making money on yet and without knowing what the FAA planned on doing it made it hard to shell out all of that now. Something interesting happened, though. One morning I woke up and was browsing my Facebook newsfeed; which is filled with photos, video, info and other people in our field. I came across a post about someone who was selling a heavy lift octocopter; which is what we had been looking at upgrading to. The interesting thing was that it was being sold at a very reasonable price. I passed it up thinking that we would never be able to get it since it was on an eBay auction. When Don messaged me the same post through Facebook we started talking about it. After some serious thought and a whole lot of doubt that we'd actually win the auction, we started bidding. We ended up losing the auction; which was no surprise to us. A few days later, I got a message through eBay telling me that the seller was trying to contact me, and it turned out that the person who had won the auction had some trouble coming up with the funds. Now the ball was in our court as to whether we would actually purchase it since we were the next highest bidder. After we decided to go ahead and buy it, we received the packages a few days later and started assembling it. As you can see above, our daughter wanted to help with putting it together. It's still in the process of being put together, but it's almost to where we can fly it.
What Happens Next
It wasn't easy deciding to purchase this new multirotor. Of course we wanted it, but it also meant that there were very likely some changes that would be coming to Redstream Digital. One of the biggest changes would mean that our focus would likely end up being specialized in aerial video/photos. The FAA is supposed to make a decision on what they plan to do about the use of these multirotors for commercial purposes, and whatever they decide we will likely end up having to buy a license of some kind and possibly even go through special training. Spending all of this money to be able to fly this thing means that we're really committed to it, and to not specialize in it would mean that we're throwing our money away to have it sitting collecting dust. We would have to market ourselves in order to be hired to actually use this and make it worthwhile. This also means that we're going to end up on the commercial side of things. We will still be doing portraits, but we're going to have to start taking on commercial work. We're evolving and I think it's in a good direction.