About the Pilot

With over 20 years as an unmanned aerial vehicle pilot and ten years as an aerial photographer, Travis Eastman Pynn, is one of the leading low altitude photographers in the industry. Since childhood, Travis has been passionate about photography and maps, spending hours imagining how it would be to see the world from a birds-eye view. His adventures flying model aircraft since these early years later progressed into flying model helicopters in 1997, which then transformed into a passion for aerial photography as well. Short of having wings, Travis’ birds-eye view dream was finally realized.

Travis’ background with unmanned systems and robotics is extensive. He is one of only a handful of certified Yamaha unmanned helicopter pilots in the U.S., trained to operate both the sophisticated RMAX and R-50 rotorcraft. In 2001, he developed the first autonomous flying wing prototype for a system that later went on to set the industry standard for small, man portable UAVs. Travis has been the lead safety pilot and systems engineer for a DARPA funded program (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) specializing in unmanned systems, including the complex VTOL UAS (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Systems) at a research lab at the University of California at Berkeley since 2002. He is involved with the development, equipment integration, manufacturing and vehicle design for the helicopters and UAVs operated within the research lab. Travis continues to have an immaculately proven safety record.

Travis’ passion for aerial photography began over ten years ago during the film-only camera era. He started with attaching inexpensive Kodak cameras with servo-releases to gliders. But, limited to only one snapshot per flight, the process was excruciatingly time consuming and the image quality low. As camera technology advanced into the digital age, Travis began aerial location scouting with digital cameras for large advertising projects through Panoramic Locations. Frustrated that the images were never being put to an end use and photograph limitations of shooting from a moving platform, Travis created a pan tilt mount for remote controlled helicopters, enabling increased mobility and hovering capabilities as well as utilizing the larger higher resolution DSLR cameras that were available. The timing couldn’t have been more ideal—there was a continually growing interest in the value of high-resolution, low altitude aerial imagery. Starting ImageAbove in 2005, Travis chose to work with high-resolution cameras and Unmanned systems to fill a void in the market place and produce the finest quality highest resolution images available.