information about our company:
RC Aerial Imaging
Owner: Joel Atkins
604 West Front Ave
Joliet, Montana 59041
(406) 591-7224
Our Mission
Rc Aerial Imaging is dedicated to making sure our customers have the best low altitude photos and video available. Our mission is to give the customer what they want at an affordable price. We work hard to make sure our equipment is in perfect working order and up to date. If you are not satisfied, we will redo it until you have just what you want. We are available 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We also are up to any challenge you have, if you need a picture, video or thermal image of it, we will figure a way to do it. The sky is literally the limit!
We want to work closely with the community. If you have a nonprofit organization that would like to have aerial photos taken just contact us. We will also work closely with all the public service agencies which include the sheriff’s department, police departments, search and rescue, fish and game, the forest service and the fire departments.
How We Started
RC Aerial Imaging was conceived in 2005 when a passion for photography and a fascination of flight collided. Joel Atkins has always been fascinated with flight, even as a child he would make “wings” and strap them to his arms trying to fly. He got into remote control planes back in 1985 and built hundreds of different models trying to achieve the fastest and best. Back then the technology was very simple and expensive to even get a simple plane in the air for very long.
In 1993 he enrolled in the Aeronautical Science program at Rock Mountain College in Billings Montana. While going through the tough job of gaining his VFR certificate in a Cessna 172, he discovered the world of photography. Digital cameras were just coming out and were very expensive, but that didn’t stop him from getting his hands on several cameras and learning the ins and outs photography.
In 1998 He found the awesome world of remote control helicopters. Building something from bags and bags of parts and being able make it fly was a marvel and he was hooked. In 1999 He started to work at a little shop that sold only remote control helicopter. That business grew to the point that it is now known as one of the largest RC helicopter shops in the world, Heliproz. There he gained the knowledge and skills to build and fly many models of rc helicopters and how the electronics worked.
In 2000 he heard of several people making mounts to put cameras on their helicopters, so he set out on the very tedious task of designing one of these mounts. After several failed attempts, he got it right and is using a highly modified version of that mount. He also had to learn a lot about electronics since there wasn’t anyone that made a system that was designed for aerial photography. After countless hours and days of soldering and wiring, testing and flying, he modified a downlink system to transmit a picture to the ground station that showed what the camera was seeing. He also modified the camera triggers electronically to be able to control the shutter, zoom and exposure wirelessly.
From there the need for something simpler and easier to get into tight places was needed, thus the PoleCam was conceived. To put into writing what was gone through to design and build the PoleCam would take another web page in its self, but it has become another tool that we use to get great photos and video. By 2005 all the different ideas and projects came to life for the first photo shoot by RC Aerial Imaging. From that day we have never looked back, and continue to give our customers a very unique and affordable service.
