11 March 2025

By Jason G. Sherblom

My name is Jason Sherblom. I am 47 years old and the father of three children. After moving to Florida from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2024, I began driving from place to place and was amazed at how flat the area is. As I continued to go to various parts of the state, admittedly, only a small part of it so far, I started to realize the breadth of the views looking in all directions. The thought occurred to me how interesting it would be to see this from above.

I do a lot of traveling for business. While I am not as impressed as I used to be looking out the window and seeing the ground from above solely for the thrill of it, I do like to look out as I fly over familiar parts to get that birds-eye view of something I know. It is that perspective change that piques my interest, which certainly sparked my interest in drones.

Something else that contributed to my newly acquired fascination with aerial photography is all the infrastructure like communication towers and electrical transmission towers I can see from many vantage points in Florida, again as it is so flat around here. Being able to see so much of the tower, even the base in a lot of locations as it is not blocked by hills and thick trees and foliage, allowed me to discover parts of those types of infrastructure I had never seen before.

Towers have always fascinated me. The taller they are the more I was drawn to them. I believe a lot of it was fear of them. It may sound odd, yet there really was a fear of these things, a lot of it due to their sheer size and mass.

Wind turbines, what I always called windmills growing up, were really my favorites when I was younger, and in many ways still are. That is because the town I lived in constructed eight 100-foot turbines on the side of Mount Wachusett in the 1980s. The school bus route I would take each day passed right by them, within 500 or so yards. As I could not see the bottom half of the towers due to the heavy tree growth, like I mentioned earlier, I think it was that unseen part that gave birth to both my amazement at the biggest things I had seen up to that point, and the new fear that developed over what exactly was behind those trees.

The noise the turbines made at that time was also a little unnerving. It was a deep and heavy whistling noise that came in and out of ear range as the relatively short (by today’s standards) 30-foot blades whooshed by, held together by the large center hub, as they spun around. I can still hear it even now. Over time, I managed to get up the nerve to go up to the site where these towers were anchored to their thick concrete bases. Sometimes, only a few of them would be operating but that sound was always present up there.

A few years later, one of the turbines collapsed during a bad storm. I only saw pictures of the wreckage in the newspaper and never saw any of the pieces in person. Seeing the mangled pile on the ground, even if only in the paper, increased my curiosity related to what these towers really were, now seeing for the first time that they were vulnerable and not the terrifying, invincible goliaths I once thought they were.

Being that they could collapse, which is something I had never thought was possible in those early days of my life, meant that they were susceptible to destruction. It hit home that they were things, built by man, which meant that man needed to be there to fabricate the pieces, assemble them on site, and climb higher and higher to work on them. That really did it for me as they were more “real” now than they had been before the collapse.

Now, fast forward a few years and I started messing around with photography. I bought a pretty nice DSLR camera in the 1990s which still used traditional rolls of film. I knew nothing else at that time, so this was fine with me. Also, it was always a thrill to drop off the rolls to be developed and experience that anticipation of how they would turn out, something that is rarely seen in today’s fast-paced technological world. I always made sure I was back right at the time the developer said the pictures would be ready!

Some decades later, I got into digital photography. That was when I really started learning about how photography worked, a little bit anyway. I was always good with computers and managed to learn software relatively quickly. It was with editing software that I learned how to clean up the shots I had taken, making them even better.

As I progressed with learning how to edit, my novice work began to get noticed. Over time, people started asking me to bring my camera to events. My sister got married a couple of years ago and she asked me to be one of the photographers there to document the occasion. I was thrilled!

The wedding took place at the Mount Washington Hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. My favorite place in the world! While I was proud to be asked to help photograph that beautiful weekend, I was especially excited to take my “good” camera up there as I had never done so before. The wedding was an enormous success and the several hundred pictures I ended up taking turned out mostly well, too.

In order to tie all of this together and answer the question of how I got involved with drones, that one is quite easy. I am a financial analyst by trade for a fantastic energy storage company. Over my years there, I fell in love with the company. Not only because of what we do as a company, but what I do for the company, data analysis. It is because of that love for what I do that I am always trying to learn as much as I can about other areas of the company, to really understand what my data is telling me about certain things. What is the story it is trying to relate?

One afternoon, I was walking through a mall when I was up north on business. I will say that again, yes, I was walking through a mall, a real mall, with stores on either side and a huge food court. With so much online shopping that is done nowadays, which I am not balking at as I take great advantage of that opportunity myself, I still treasure the times I can walk through a real mall or department store. Partly, maybe, out of nostalgia for those good old days of my youth.

Back to my point, as I was walking through the mall, I received a message through Microsoft Teams. Our Director of Project Management had asked one of our construction managers if he could go to a job site at some point and use his “FAA license” to get some drone footage of the progress. I stopped dead in my tracks and moved to the side of the aisle to get out of the flow of foot traffic to read it again.

While I had seen images of many of our job sites on the company’s intranet page, I never stopped to think about how those pictures were taken. In today’s online world, we see overhead images of locations all the time. However, when I read those few words, I realized there was a real need for a qualified and knowledgeable person to go out with a drone and collect those top-down images from above. I started researching that night about the FAA requirements and drone piloting.

It was not long after I began outfitting myself with a fairly good drone set up. That then led to purchasing one of my favorite pieces of technology ever, my Matterport Pro2 digital camera, which takes 360-degree photo images to create digital twins of a location. I learned about other 360-degree photo and video options and ended up starting my company, JS Media Group located here in Wildwood, Florida. I began offering virtual tour creation for real estate with my Matterport, along with aerial photography and videography with my drone. I even moved along with working on certification to conduct tower inspections with my equipment.

A new world has certainly opened up to me because of that little flying camera, and the rest is history that has not yet been written. The sky is literally the limit!

Fly safe out there!

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