MojoMedia Blog

I don’t like calling it a “drone” because that’s not what it is. It’s a quadcopter camera. The word “drone,” to me, puts it in the category of a weapon currently used in warfare, and I am 100% not into that.

To me, it’s a tense exercise because it’s a really nice camera and it’s expensive, and one wrong glitch at the wrong time can make it go poof and go away. I can’t say that about any of my other cameras, which are strapped to me at all times. This one just floats around and flits to and fro like a dragonfly.

I bought it for work, but as yet haven’t done anything professional with it, as first I need to get a professional drone license. Yes, I need a professional license to fly it if I want to make money with it. Right now I only have a recreational license, so everything I’m doing is for practice and “fun.”

Like these rather boring photos I took of our local botanical center this weekend…

One of the things I eventually want to do is start using this flying camera for taking real estate pictures as a side gig, which is why I’m taking pictures of buildings. Here are a few from last year, when I first got this camera.

One of the most nerve-wracking things for me to do is fly the camera over water, but this weekend I applied the “Fear is the mind killer” mantra from Dune and sent the buzzing little busybody out over the Mississippi River, and took a photo of the center of our local Centennial Bridge from the middle. Despite the cold, my palms were sweating the whole time it was out there, and I didn’t even get a great photo because I was in too much of a hurry to get it back over dry land.

The view was better from the sunward side anyway…

I think my favorite images I’ve captured with this flying camera are of ruins. Not ancient ones, but the more recent urban decay variety.

And then there’s scenic sky shots, which this camera seems to excel at, but only when there are a lot of clouds.

Anyway, that is what I was up to this weekend. That, and working on the latest novel. Here’s a sneak peek at the cover:

No release date is set, yet, but it should be out before the end of this year. Like I keep saying after every new book, “This one is probably my last.”

Recorded June 21st, 2013 in Porvoo, Finland

A magical time that I’ll never forget, where the sun never set and the birds sang all night long.

Recorded in Rock Island on November 18th, 2024

Since it seems I’m not going to podcast anymore, I was about to sell this Zoom H6 recorder on eBay, but at the last minute I pulled it back down and decided I would keep it, and use it to record nature sounds.

This evening I put it up next to one of my upstairs windows and recorded the rain.

Playing with my Insta360 camera.

I’ve been a photographer since the late 1970s, and for some reason, I’ve always been oriented toward telephoto lenses. 35mm is the widest I’d ever gone, and that was only recently. It was always 50mm, 70mm, 105mm, or longer. I took lots of pictures of birds and squirrels, used macro zoom to capture objects for work, or portraits with zoom for maximum bokeh.

But then I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 15 Pro Max with that super wide-angle lens and started playing around with that. Then I bought one of those higher-end Insta360 cameras (for work, to get pictures of interiors of structures), and in using these, I realized something:

I have been seriously limiting myself.

I have no idea why I’d never been interested in wide-angle lenses, but I’m glad, really, that I’d avoided them. Why? Because now, after all these years, I have something new to explore: reality.

Our eyes are wide-angle lenses. The world is a wide-angle experience. Telephoto lenses, in a way, are a filter that allows you to focus on a detail — which is fine — but a wide-angle image gives the whole picture. It captures the whole slice of time.

I know, I know. It’s obvious. Duh, Jerry. But my point is, here I am at 63 years old, and now I get to do something new. That is a gift from my earlier self. It saved something new for me to learn and grow.

I’ve started simple, with a 10–20mm Sigma zoom lens for my Nikon that I bought used for (comparatively) next to nothing. This is in contrast to my bazooka-sized 600mm Sigma zoom. My original impetus was that I needed a lens for the Nikon to capture something large in a small space for work. But after work, I took it out and started exploring the rest of reality with it.

I love it. It’s made me an instant wide-angle-phile.

We live in the future. AI programs paint pictures of my characters based on my descriptions.

Right to left, top to bottom: Lulu, Tom, and Franchesca from All You See is Light; Eva from No Such Thing as Mermaids; Yvonne Fong from Typewriter Repairman; the Lacerta Simio creatures from Seeds From Ancient Earth, and Katherina also from Seeds From Ancient Earth.