Hey here is a cool update: I purchased a 3D printer that I plan to use to make things for the business and potentially sell as Renegade Digital LLC. Here are a few shots of the printer and a few small prints I made the first day. You can see a QR Code for this website being printed on one picture, as well as a small drone business card that you can assemble to make a little toy drone. I have a few business ideas for the 3D printer, but as of now I am going to test it out and see what it is capable of doing! 

I first notices Entzel Acres on my way up to the previous post's Mandan real estate photography! I knew that I had to make my way back after capturing that house! I was lucky enough to find the home owner outside picking up the mail. I simply asked if it would be okay to photograph the lot with all of the tractors and equipment and she okay'd it no problem. I gave her my business card and told her to email me in a few days and I would have the edits for her! I also took an aerial shot of the property just for them knowing it would be a fantastic shot! I am glad I stopped over at the right time, it was a great little shoot with not much drone battery left from the house I had photographed just prior to stopping back at Entzel Acres! 

Here was a very nice house in the outskirts of Mandan! The house was 3000+ sq feet with a great yard and new fixtures everywhere. Houses like this one are very easy to photgraphy, they make it nearly impossible to fine a bad shot. Photo and video for a house like this are fun and I could live with a house like this every week! Here are the photos and the listing video for this gorgeous property! 

Shores at Lakewood! This is my second development with Verity. The first was the work on the Ash Coulee Drive development. The same plan with this Mandan development, photos and videos. I flew and recored all of the aerial shots and put together a pretty simple, but clean promotional video! Here are some of the photos, along with a promo video to boot! This was the first project I implemented the 360-Degree photos by Momento360.com. They have been a staple moving forward! 

Here is an update on my gear! I added another battery for the DJI Mini 3 Pro, a neck sling for the controller for safety or in case I need to take my hands off of the controller, a few tools and PPE/Safety Glasses and Vest, as well as a power pack and custom ground control points made from black duct tape and rubber bases! This setup may seem a little janky, though it is a very solid setup that should prove very effective to take on the road. The new Pekrews backpack perfectly houses my DJI Mini 3 Pro and the controller, along with everything else I need, and more! If it has to do with a drone or photos, I am set to go with this gear. Maybe overkill, maybe not, either way I am setup for exteded play with my drone and more! 

Round 2 of Wilton Restoration History! I was able to come up with more photos to restore and color. The process was fun and a great way to give back to the community. I have since made all of these photos free to download for anyone to enjoy! 

Another round of real estate photography in the Mandan area. This time with a little bit of snow on the ground! This home had some nice hardwoof flooring in the livingroom and kitchen area. The bathrooms were nice and the downstairs was open. This was the first house I have photographed in quite some time. The housing market is a little slow right now! Let's hope the market picks up soon! 

This was fun! I was able to fly the drone over and around the construction site to capture just under one hundred photos. The photos captured were ran through WebODM to process 2D and 3D imagery. I was able to measure distances, heights and volumes. With the 3D imagery you can make a mesh model and texture model to see the photos come to life! There are so many applications for this type of imagery, from construction to roofing to asphalt and pavement appications, not to mention farming and agriculture/nursery and gardening. This type of project is really fun and makes your photos come to life! 

I was able to work with the town of Wilton and thier awesome Mayor to acquire and digitally scan historical photographs! Some of the photos being over 100 years old! I spend the afternoon scanning in just about 100 photos. I ran them through the editing process of sharpening, tone correcting, restoring and with some, coloring! I ended up with around 130 digitally restored photos. They turned out great. I am trying to get ahold of more photos from the auditor, as well as contacting other rural towns to see if I can help them digitally restore and save! The process is really fun to go through and see the history, plus I just love old photos, they have such a unique character to them. This project was pretty cool, and I hope to continue to post updates in the future! 

Another round of real estate photography in the Mandan area. I cozy little house right off of the interstate. The place was kept up well and the interior was clean. I was quite efficient with this house, as I was there just over an hour! I am getting better and better at the photo taking aspect. Oh, and the new iPhone update added a level to the photo app. It is very cool and very helpful! 

A condo in North Bismarck needed photgraphs and I was the person for the job! The condo was on the older side, though it was kept up well and clean. The condo had a garage located outside of the building, not to far of a walk. The whole process took just about an hour to photograph, so the picture taking part of my endevour is getting more efficient. The place was 2 bedroom and 2 bath, one floor. I enjoy these types of jobs. There was no aerials and no video! 

1953 AMOX EMD SW1 600hp Engine 1940 Northern Pacific Railway NP 202124 Box Car 1963 Burlington Northern M930 BN12591 Caboose

- Built for Whiting Refinery, Whiting, IN - Built by American Car and Foundry in 1940 - Built as Great Northern X73

- Officially retired 1998 - Midwest Boxcar serviced in 1970 formerly 15672 - Rebuilt as BN 10233 (date unknown)

  - Rebuilt as NP 202124 (date unknown)   - Rebuilt as BN 12591 in 1991

What a lovely 3400 sq ft house in North Bismarck this is! With a great location and a ton, a vurtual ton of storage, this house had it all. I was able to take photos and video for this listing, and let me tell you that I had fun doing so. The house was newly painted, so it had that fresh smell. The flooring was redone with the hardwood, in the living and master bedroom, as well as maintenance free decking on all three decks! The appliances were nice, especially the fridge, that was great and very clean, probably recently brand new. I had a fantastic time working this house. 

Sunsets are something to bewonder. They happen every day, but none are the same! This is my take on a sunset in ND, with variations via the paint feature. Enjoy! 

North Bismarck is a very booming place. New houses, new developments, everything is growing and expanding. I was able to take real estate photographs for one of the newer houses in one of the newer developments, Ash Coulee Development. The photos were fun to capture, I was even able to take a listing video for the client! It was great fun, I am looking forward to taking more in the future of this housing development. 

I had to catch aerials of the first snow of 2023. The weather can be treterous or beautiful, sometimes both. It can also make for great photographs. You have to take advantage of shots when you can, this being one of them. im glad it snowed, even though I shortly after fired up the snowblower to move the snow. 

Aerial photos at a residence with a pool and tennis court basically photograph themselves! I was able to catch this house right before the snow showed up. I was able to get in-and-out before the wind picked up and edit them for the realtor in no time. This was a fun shoot and a quick edit to boot. 

What is more exciting than the cupcake table at a wedding.. it's the photo booth! I set up and ran a photo booth at a wedding I was part of. It went pretty well, though the learning experience I gained was well worth the effort. Setting up a photo booth is hard work. You have the custom layouts, the backdrop, lighting, lighting, lighting, than you have to be the guy who gets people excited to take the photos. The bride and groom are expecting some great photos, some they can cherish forever. The photos turned out great, the process was very insightful and the wholen night was a very lovely event. 

This is going to end up as a photo dump. Along the way to my Dawson, ND adventure I was able to stop off a few places to take some great photos. Here are the results of that trip. Enjoy!

Off to Dawson, ND for some real estate photography. The drive was about 90 minues from Bismarck, but this was alright. The realtor agreed to the milage rate for the round trip, so the travel process was just part of the gig. This was a large farmstead with a one-level patio. The major upside for this property was the land and buildings. The farmstead is set up very well for livestock. The aerials were really fun, I really needed to zoom the drone up to see the whole property line. I believe it was a 14 acre lot. The yard was also quite large, so mowing and snow removal are sure to be a chore. Overall, the place was a nice shoot and the house was clean, no furniture, no staging. This can be harder to shoot, though, with nothing in the shot to focus on. Also, the lights, the lights were YELLOW. People, please, please, please do not put those old crummy yellow lights in your house. It was a fun trip, as I was also able to stop along on the way back to grab a few other aeirals of historical areas!

Back at the grind, real estate photography in Bismarck is a hapening event. I was able to hop in and work a session in North Bismarck. The aerial photos turned out great, the interior upstairs was finished, but not furnished, and the basement was not as desireable as it could be, but it was a nice little place. The photos turned out well, and it was a good time. This is not to say there weren't any hiccups! The neighbor had their car parked directly infront of the driveway. Luckily the drone was still able to grab some front-of-house shots. Their was a giant batch of garbage ready to be taken out, so that had to be moved out of the shot, than back to the front to be picked up after the shoot. The basement lighting was yellow. Every. Light. Was. Yellow. That is so hard to remove post without making the photos look desaturated. Thankfully, the flooring and carpet were lighter so I could pull some of the yellow. Use white lights, people, please! The whole shoot was fun and aside from the neighbor dog on one side and the neighbor car on the other, the whole process was pretty painless. 

I tried my hand out with the new app to help digitize and restore photos from my baby photobook. I have a very large, over 200 photo photobook from age 1-2. I sat down and went through the book (omitting any duplicates or ones that were so similar it wouldn't make sense to save them more than once). It was a time consuming process, but I was able to save a whole photobook digitally. The program I used allows me to crop, edit, color and enhance photos, it's great! As you can see, I was able to take your standard polaroid style photographs and digitize them, restore them and color correct them so they can be saved forever! I was able to restore the only photo that was overexposed and help restore it to a more manageable color pallete. It may not be perfect, but to have the ability to bring your old photos back to life is something that can often be priceless! 

I love old buildings. I love when they are on the brink of destruction (sounds morbid, I know). I love when they have a historic past. The first picture is the Pleasant View School House located in Township 144, North Dakota. North Dakota does a great job of logging and record keeping of their historical buildings. This is an awesome reference to have, especially to give the photo accurate information and not just having to label the photo Old School Building. To be able to look up and find information on the photos that you take, you give them history, you give them a purpose and you give them back story! The second photo is from the Alta Community Church & Cemetary, North Dakota. This is a very cool photograph due to the slight uncomfortability people have with graveyards, but also being able to bring the old church back to life, even for just one photograph. 

I should also mention that I prefer to rust out the photographs, like an old tintype photograph in the wild west. I am trying to replicate the old style photos, especially ones where the buildings or subjects of the photos ARE indeed old or weathered. I like this look a lot. I also like to add the text subject as a 'typewriter' font. This also gives the photograph that old-school feel as if someone actually had to dig out the giant, heavy, cumbersome typewriter, only to come to the conclusion it was more hasstle than it was worth! 

Local business can benefit tremendously from the exposure and images of aerial photographs. Take this business, for example: you would never be able to achieve these angles from the ground! You would never be ale to capture the full site and every building if you were not taking photographs from the sky. Building a relationship with local businesses can help you build your portfolio and provide them with a service they may not have been aware existed. Even if you have to take a few aerial sessions for free, or reduced cost (initially), take that opportunity to do so. If you have permission and the business owns the logo, photoshop the logo onto the pictures for an easy marketing WIN for the business owner. Of course, though, send the owner copies of the logo photos AND the edited non-logo photos to let them choose which ones they want to post. In the future, adding logos, trademarks, phone numbers or the business name can be an upcharge for your time and effort! 

Farm neighbors are great for many things: sharing apples from their apple trees, helping you move snow in the winter to clear a road, letting you know when the big buck deer passes over into your area! They are also great for letting you fly your drone around their land to grab some awesome farmstead aerials. Nothing beats zipping your drone up a few hundred meters to take an overhead property line shot. Those are some of my favorite shots to capture. Farmstead and countryside aeirals have so much more going on in the background, making them very wall print worthy photographs. Rolling hills, fields of golden yellow, green trees and brushes, large open skies; these are just some of the few amazing features that farmstead photographs can portray. 

This was the day that started it all for me. By this time I had just purchased and recieved my first Drone, a DJI Mini 3 Pro with only ONE battery! I quickly learned that I had never operated something like this before, and had only watched YouTube videos on how to fly one of these bad boys. Never-the-less, I was able to spend some time in my back yard learning the basics and thankful that I spent the money on the Pro Model with collision sensors on all sides, which would prove to be an absolutly brilliant idea! 

Once I was able to figure out the basics of flying, my skills took off like...well, like the drone i was flying around the newly mowed 1/4 acre lot! I was taking 48mp photos like they were going out of style. I was shooting aerial  passby 4K videos like I was a professional. All while I still had no idea what I was going to do with them, let alone where I was going to share them too. Of course, Facebook is always a fine option. 

Backing up a few weeks before this, our Realtor Agent was looking for someone to take Real Estate photos. I had already been dabbling in the black arts of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I knew my way around video editing software with the LumaFusion iPad app. I knew that if I could find a way to get my foot into the door the photos would look great. I had recently upgraded to the iPhone 14 Pro with the front 48 mp rear camera (though it it not a true 48mp, but a 12mpx4 ai compiled image, blah blah) and 12mp rear wide angle camera. Uploading them and sharing them from the phone to iPad is a breeze. I took a chance, bought a drone and did the most obvious thing that anyone could think of... ask a family member with a nice looking house if I could take pictures and post them online ha. So I did just that, along with recording a 4K video and a Zillow 3D Walkthrough Tour. What a better way to test out my skills than a good ol' practice session. That is what I did and here is where we are: the journey begins!