Donald E. Waite, President of Waite Air Photos Inc. (Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada), became involved in aerial photography in the early 1980s and within a few years was concentrating primarily on the marketing of air photographs to realtors and developers. This resulted in the purchase of a camera system that was ideal for the taking of air photos from a fixed-wing aircraft. After a few years he began to have quite a collection of carefully catalogued images. The lady that had the most impact on his air photo career was Carol Hindley, the "picture buyer" for Colliers International Realty Corporation. Several times a year she would call and request that he make the 60 kilometer drive into the city to show her his most recent images. One day she suggested he arrange his pictures alphabethically by municipality, photocopy them, and leave the copied collection in her possession. Later on - to facilitate the re-ordering process - Waite captioned each image with a description, film roll and negative number, and the flight date.

During this time he began to arrange his entire collection by municipality and date and scotch tape the 4" x 5" previews, 4 to the page, into 8 1/2" by 11" folders which were then placed into 3-ring binders. It wasn't long before he had about 40 binders,each in their own compartment, in the back of his van. His daily agenda Monday through Friday began with rolling out of bed at 6 in order to be on the road and headed into the city by 7. In the late 1980s he'd go from appointment to appointment and usually see about 5 clients per pay but by the early 1990s, due to heavier traffic and the advent of telphone message machines, his visits dropped to 3-4 visits per day. There was another major problem in that quite often the weather would take a change for the better but he was unable to cancel appointments and scramble to get a pilot and get up in the air to take pictures. He came to the conclusion that he was working harder only to realize that his yearly profit picture was dropping. He decided to make black and white positive mechanical transfers (PMTs) of his collection and have them hard bound into books.

The books worked so well that he decided to purchase state-of-the-computer equipment and place low and high resolution images onto CD-ROM. Unfortunately, most clients did not own computers with the capacity to deal with large files and the project was a flop.

In 1995 Waite began placing his air photos on the Internet confident that this medium would eventually have a 100 times more impact than the air photo picture books or the CD-ROM packages. After spending a great deal of money with service providers and web designers (with a great deal of money going out but not coming in) Waite hired a high school student who built a "simple" site under his supervision. The user can easly surf from Country > Province/State/Territory/ > City > Sub Area > Year > Month > Image. The air photo web site is at:
Waite Air Photos

It is Waite's goal to take take the site "Global" in the new Millennium.

Waite purchased his discharge from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1971 to open a camera store/portrait studio in Maple Ridge and, a few years later, a second operation in Abbotsford. He sold the two businesses to devote time to writing four books on British Columbia history and co-authoring two books on bird photography. They are titled 'The Art of Photographing North American Birds' and Photographing North American Birds Perfecting the Art'. The bird photography web site is at:
Global Bird Photos