Getting the picture New Whitefish business called Gravityshots is taking to the air to help local resorts and Realtors with marketing By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian Adele Valentino and her partner Jeff Scholl use a remote-controlled helicopter to take aerial photos for local resorts and businesses. Courtesy photo WHITEFISH – In Montana, where small business is king and quality of life often trumps the lure of a steady income, many have found ways to turn their hobbies into livelihoods. There are the artists and the artisans, the raft guides and the ski patrollers, the outfitters and the bike shop owners and the fishing guides. But what to do when your hobbies are many and varied? What to do when you’re a licensed pilot, say, who loves to ski and kayak and take pictures and play with computers? No problem. Just buy yourself a remote-controlled helicopter, strap on a digital camera, and start making aerial images of skiing and kayaking and all the rest of the “gravity sports” for your own Web-based photo business. “We started grabbing shots in 1999,” said Adele Valentino, who with her partner Jeff Scholl runs an up-and-coming business they call Gravityshots. “At first, it was all about action sports – ski racing and kayaking and rafting – because those were the things we like to do.” Now, Gravityshots is maturing, finding new clients in the real estate and resort communities, taking shots from above that golf courses and resort owners and Realtors use in marketing. “We’re always looking for new clients,” Valentino said. “Basically, anyone who needs affordable aerial photographs.” Scholl, she said, had studied photography all his life before putting the lens aside to focus on flying. A couple years ago, he bought his first remote-controlled helicopter, a gasoline-driven machine with remarkable power. About that same time, he and Valentino started taking pictures of events up on the Big Mountain, a ski resort located in Whitefish. They were selling prints, and stacking up an impressive web archive of images, all scanned from color slide film. “Then he gets this idea to put a camera in the air,” Valentino said. The next thing she knows, her cameras are taking off into the blue beyond without her. At first, she said, they used the gasoline-powered chopper, “but the gas fumes and exhaust kept getting in the way. It was a lot of trial and error.” Scholl would stand below, she said, operating the remote control and trying to eyeball where he thought the lens might be aimed. Then, with one hand trying to keep the helicopter hovering steady, he would trip a button and shoot blind. Gravityshots can give tourists and prospective land buyers a birds-eye view of Montana’s Flathead Valley. Courtesy photo “It was pretty rough at first,” she admits. Since then, the company has gone digital – “we like that instant gratification” – and their new helicopter is electric, without the exhaust. They also have strapped a second camera above the first, which is connected via a radio signal to a ground-based monitor Valentino watches below. That way, she said, she can see exactly what the main camera is seeing, and can trip the shutter while Scholl keeps both hands free to fly the helicopter. That means no more shooting blind, which means projects take just a fraction of the time they used to. The medium, however, continues to present challenges – “when you’re up that high, you sometimes have a lot of wind to deal with” – and they find themselves making constant adjustments both to the shooting as well as the flying. Most of the time, for instance, they shoot fast shutter speeds – a thousandth of a second – to compensate for the rattle and shake of the three-foot long chopper. They’ve tried video, she said, but it will be a while yet before that’s perfected. “The movie was pretty shaky,” she said. “I get carsick, so I’m not the best judge of it, but even other people who saw it were, like, ‘whooaa.’ ” The photographic images, however, are crystal clear, and have been used by all sorts of clients. The biggest job to date, she said, was for Hines Resorts, the development company currently engaged in a $300 million expansion of the Big Mountain’s village area. They also have shot marketing images for Realtors, golf course developers, land-use planners, utilities and private companies, including contractors looking for bird’s eye view of their projects. “These are people who have been using aerial photography for years,” she said of the clients. “But we can do it a lot cheaper. We fly and shoot for $200 per hour.” They can also fly on days when low smoke or clouds might ground conventional aircraft. “It’s pretty amazing what you can do with these little helicopters,” she said. “And this is the first time people around here have had access to these kinds of pictures at an affordable price.”