Your saying you flew for 3.5 to 4 hours.?
Yep and I can show you days where I've flown (
I don't mean sitting around waiting on someone to make decisions etc) more than that.
I did a cell phone tower inspection two months ago. I shot 1000 photos it took two batteries. Just curious how many pics you took.
You do realize that "Tower Inspections" and shooting high quality Architectural shots are night and day different. Also you don't even mention the possibility of shooting video.
These particular homes are ultra high-end residences and we spend a LOT of time at each home getting multiple still shots, many various video shots (these take a lot of time) and various site scouting on each one. We are flying in and through trees, up driveways, up to and over the home, doing a full orbit of the residence, a 360 compilation, and in some cases flying INTO the home through the front/back door. These things take time, re-shoots, and practice on site.
I can pretty much assure you that my work and what you're describing are not the same. And when you mention 1,000 images that's not that many... consider we are shooting AEB (5 exp) and it's not unheard of to shoot 5x that in a single day. We filled up several SD cards in our work just yesterday. Granted I sort through my shots and discard MANY and only process the best of the lot but we take many GB of data on any given day.
I filmed a tv commercial for BMW in January. It was a 12 hour work day. I flew my shot 5 times. I used one battery. I’m sure you used 9 batteries.
LOL! I shot a TV show (not commercial) for The Travel Channel and we were on set (
4 different locations actually) for 2 days straight and only used a total of 5 batteries but that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Most of our time was spent waiting for our shots to come on schedule.
I’m sure you used 9 batteries. But most pilots don’t.
I'm glad you can confidently speak for "most pilots". Many of the professional pilots I've worked with have a large inventory of batteries and other related components just-in-case. Maybe we're just doing it wrong. One of our local guys has an M600 that uses 6 batteries per flight. That's when battery management can get kind of crazy (
and expensive).
If I was using 9 batteries I’d by 3 batteries and use a battery field charger. You’ll save about $250 dollars in batteries.
LOL! I've got field chargers as well. I've also got spare transmitters and spare aircraft so that we can hit multiple sites and shoot non-stop in order to meet our clients strict schedules.
Ok you say you could do it with just 3 batteries and a "field charger". Let's run the math and let's be conservative about it. Let's say we are willing to push our batteries to the MAX (
and I do not) and always land with 20% capacity left. Let's assume we get 30min from 100% so landing with 20% gives a 24min flight time. We have 3 batteries and a battery takes approx 60-80 min to charge.
All of these jobs are in the same mountain gated community with an average drive time from one to the other of 5 min so we don't have the luxury of a lot of "windshield time".
Job #1 - I fly for 24min on batt1 and 18min on batt2. So now I have to allow for charging of 2 batteries (
120-160min unless we use a multi-charger but then we still have to have a min of 60min to recharge). This is a fairly typical scenario for our high-end products. Usually 2 batteries per house/listing. Sometimes if the 2nd battery was barely used we "may" use it on the beginning of the next shoot but if it's less than 70% we start fresh. It depends on what our shot list looks like and the complexity of the shoot.
Job #2 - I fly 24min on batt3 and now I'm waiting on batt1 and batt2 to recharge and now I have a homeowner and an architect standing around waiting on me to get my work done on this home and explain to them that my trying to save $250 is now holding up some big $$ waiting on batteries to charge. This whole process snowballs until the architect gets fed up and never calls me back again. We are only on Job #2 and
Job #3, Job #4, and
Job #5 are now in a perpetual hurry up and wait scenario.
I flew 5 yesterday with no interruptions waiting on batteries to charge.
These are multi-Million dollar homes and we are the only aerial photograph company allowed into the community. It's well worth the "expense" of having spares and extras on hand. Here's one of the homes we shot:
If I was using 9 batteries I’d by 3 batteries and use a battery field charger. You’ll save about $250 dollars in batteries.
$250 is a small price to pay to be able to do the job expected, in the time frame expected, and to produce a high-end final product for our clients.