September 2016 – Beesquared

Aerial photography is having a moment.

This Monday, GoPro, a maker of cameras and accessories that allow people to capture themselves surfing, biking, climbing, driving or participating in all sorts of activities (just Google it), will unveil the company’s first drone.

According to the company, the device, named Karma, can maneuver in spaces as tight as the stacks at a library. Karma reportedly can sync with a clip that users attach to their bodies, allowing the drone to follow along without someone needing to operate a controller, which I imagine can be hard to do if you’re descending through the backcountry on a bike.

It’s also a moment for GoPro. The company, which said in May it has sold about 20 million cameras since it began in 2002, has seen the price of its shares slide from a high of $87 two years ago to about $15 lately as investors question whether GoPro can broaden sales of its gear beyond enthusiasts. As Mike Murphy wrote in Quartz last December, “it’s starting to feel as if everyone who wants to record themselves hurtling down mountains, out of planes, and off cliffs already has a GoPro.”

The company agrees. “Our growth historically has largely been fueled by the adoption of our products by people looking to self-capture images of themselves participating in exciting physical activities,” it wrote in its latest annual report. “We believe that our future growth depends not only on continuing to reach and expand this core demographic, but also broadening our user base to include a more diverse group of consumers seeking to capture their daily lives.”

So GoPro needs the drone to succeed. Whatever happens, we should be in for some terrific videos.

Writing in the Times recently, Dwight Garner described the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer as “precious,” which it kind of is. But the book continues to resonate with me as a remembrance of 9/11.

The novel tells a story of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old in New York City whose father died that day in the World Trade Center. After his father’s death, Oskar sets off on a journey through the city to find the lock that matches a key that belonged to his father. Early in the novel, Oskar remembers his father:

“Dad always used to tuck me in, and he’d tell the greatest stories, and we’d read the New York Times together, and sometimes he’d whistle ‘I am the Walrus,’ because that was his favorite song, even though he couldn’t explain what it meant, which frustrated me. One thing that was so great was how he could find a mistake in every single article we looked at. Sometimes they were grammar mistakes, sometimes they were mistakes with geography or facts, and sometimes the article just didn’t tell the whole story.

I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.”

The novel ends with a series of photographs of a man whose fall from the Twin Towers was captured by Richard Drew, a photojournalist on assignment with the Associated Press in an image that captures the horror of that day. Oskar reverses the series, flip-book style, so that the man appears to be falling upward. Oskar describes the effect:

“And if I’d had more pictures, he would have flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would have poured back into the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would’ve left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston.”

The chronology continues in reverse, with Oskar’s father walking backward to the subway and home, spitting coffee into his mug, unbrushing his teeth, and, the night before, telling Oskar a story, in reverse, from “I love you” to “Once upon a time…”