My friend Chuck Park is a renaissance man.  With a degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona, a career behind him as a Tucson fire fighter, and a new career using a camera and a kite, you might say that Chuck is pretty diversified. 

Flying is Chuck's thing.  The walls of the Tucson home he shares with wife Laural are decorated with his paintings.  I particularly like the watercolor paintings of historic aircraft done at the Pima Air Museum.   

Chuck is an aerial photographer.  He works for Pima County, but real estate agents hire him as well.  (Pricing IMHO is cheap!  More on that in Part 2)  He's got a couple of tools for his trade.  That colorful kite in the photo above is extremely stable, and it carries aloft a digital camera, hung from a tether.  (Another tool is his remote-control airplane with a camera mount, but that's fodder for another blog post.)

Everything fits into a backpack.  Setup, you can imagine, is a little dicy when your butt is inches from spiny cacti no matter which way you turn.  The kite frame consists of telescoping carbon fiber rods.  A gust of light breeze, and the kite soars aloft.  Chuck lets out enough line to assure the kite will stay airborne, and ties it off while he attaches the camera to the line.

The camera hangs in a cradle which allows it to zoom in and out, pan left and right, and tilt up and down.  It's all controlled by that remote control device in the photo.  Chuck is sending me some aerial pictures, and I'll share them with you in the second part of this post. 

Here's what we were looking for, though--fossilized wood.  Fossilized logs, actually, broken up over time.  The actual species hasn't been determined, but doesn't it look like the wood had burned before fossilizing?

 I'm Mike in Tucson, your preferred Tucson, Arizona mortgage lender.

Think of me as your Tucson expert.