(Story originally appeared October 31st, 2018)
By: Timothy Kays
You might not know just who Jeremy Williams is, but if you are from Northwest Ohio and have access to Facebook, chances are that you sure know what he does.
Jeremy is the man behind Williams Aerial. He is the guy that has been capturing all the fascinating area sunrise and sunset images from his drone.
A member of the Stryker Class of 2000, Jeremy is the son of Dr. Gery and Bobie Williams, and the elder brother of Kenny, Olivia and Sophia. He is married to Annette Williams, and together they have three kids and eight grandkids.
A busy lifestyle like his doesn’t grant much time to learn the concepts of flight, but Jeremy has no problems in that arena… He’s been flying since his days of youth. As it turns out, flight is a Williams family tradition.
Jeremy first got interested in drones when he first saw one. How long ago was that? “Years ago, back when you started seeing them on
magazines like Popular Mechanics,” Jeremy said. “I’ve grown up with gliders. I took rocketry in 4-H. My dad was in the Air Force, so growing up he always did rocketry with us and stuff.”
“He had remote control airplanes, so now I have a six-foot wingspan gas airplane in my garage. We’ve always been into aviation, and once I started seeing drones coming down in price, I’d buy little ones to practice and play with… and crash and destroy. The little tiny thirty to fifty dollar ones.”
The days of the little drones have since passed. Jeremy has upgraded to the big time with his new machine. “It’s a DJI Phantom 4 Pro Plus. I’ve had this one since February.”
“I’ve had an AR drone for over a year, and then I had multiple little ones for around four years before that. Most of the time it was always airplanes, little helicopters and stuff like that.”
“I didn’t get big into it until the last three years, which was probably where I actually spent the bigger money and got an actual drone.”
It was all fun and flight, then came the idea of aerial photography. “A couple years ago,” he said, “…what I had was an AR drone. It was a nice sized two-foot drone, but it flew off your phone so it wasn’t really very good picture wise, but it had a camera on the front.”
“I got tired of always having video where when you turned right, your camera would turn right. I wanted something with a gimbal on it so that it would be a nice, level, professional looking photo or video. ”
“I saved up and I bought another drone that had a gimbal on it. It was like not a name brand or anything like that.” The fuse was lit.
“I basically watched a lot of YouTube videos and people that were working on them,” Jeremy continued, “…so if I broke it, I would order the parts and then watch a YouTube video, fix it myself and modify it.”
“I’ve been doing that for probably a year with that other drone, and getting better at the flying, the composition of the photography and stuff. I looked into the information, a lot of YouTube videos that would help. You have to get commercial license to even make money on it; you can’t just get paid to do it without a license.”
“There’s a lot of rules orregulations. I ended up buying the DJI Phantom 4; I could have bought a cheaper version of those DJI drones, but with what I wanted for the photography, I wanted to get the better cameras. It has really worked out, since the stuff that comes off of it looks amazing!”
Some people would be content to just snap a few images from a few hundred feet above ground level. Jeremy is not in that category, and that is what sets Williams Aerial apart.
“I went to Living Word in Stryker when I was a kid for my junior years,” he recalled, “…and I went to Four County for the last two years of school. I took commercial graphic arts, so I have a background in graphics with Photoshop and all kinds of design.”
“Once I got this new drone, I could get sunsets, and shoot in manual mode and bring photography into it more. It really, really pops. We live in this flat land of Northwest Ohio where it’s quite boring, so you always have to ask, ‘what’s that look like from the sky?”
“I’d always look for sunsets or sunrises, or something that brings up color, like for the season change. So basically, every night I’m always out looking for a sunset, waiting for that right time to pull the drone out and get above the trees.”
“You try to do that on the ground and you’ll get trees, buildings, power lines or something in your way.” The proof is in the results, and a look inside the photo gallery at www.facebook.com/williamsaerial will give you a jaw-dropping perspective on your community that you never even imagined.
Jeremy has become quite good capturing the sunrise and sunset colors of God’s paint palette, but that’s not all that he does. He has developed quite the following in the process, and people have been asking how to get in contact with the man and his flying camera.
“So far I’ve been doing it with just Facebook,” Jeremy said. “I post pictures, and people like my page. When they like something, they normally just message me, and then I can ask them if they want a daytime photo or a sunset photo.”
“I can give them a price range now, because for the first year I was doing it just for fun. I was going around just getting shots that I thought were pretty and beautiful, and making my skills better.”
“Then once I got my commercial license, I could actually charge for it. I’ve had multiple people that have had photos done of their house years ago from an airplane. They’ll send me a picture of the photos on their wall, and I’ll come over and I’ll try to match the same angle.”
“That’s what they want, so they can get an updated version of it. Since I have a Photoshop background, I’ve even gone in and removed the car out of the driveway, cleaned up the yard, cleaned up the pond because it had algae and stuff in it.”
“I have done all that and made it look really nice… kind of like what they did back in the day. Once I do that, I can send them an invoice and they can pay me online.”
“Then I normally will send them a Google Drive link, and they can download all the photos. I send them the high-resolution versions that they can print at Walgreens or Wal-Mart, and print out whatever they want; they have the photos.”
Jeremy has big plans for the future of Williams Aerial. He said, “I’m looking at getting another controller so I can do mapping for farmlands; map the crops and stuff like that.”
“There’s so many things you can do… it’s not even funny. I have a calendar coming out next year that will have photos of Defiance County in it, and I’m thinking about maybe even starting one up for Williams County.”
“I could probably put a calendar together for next year of just beautiful sunset photos from every town in Williams County.”
So the next time that you’re out and about in Northwest Ohio and you hear a hum overhead, take a look skyward. You just might be a part of the subject matter of a new Williams Aerial image.
Timothy can be reached at tim@thevillagereporter.com
