Duplain Aerials

Southwest Florida · Est. Sarasota

Evidence, from above.

We fly drone surveys for HOAs across Southwest Florida. Most of our work is shoreline and retention-pond documentation, the kind of record your board is often required to keep but is difficult to produce from the ground. The result is a dated visual archive your community, your lake-management vendor, and your compliance file can all work from.

FAA Part 107 Fully Insured Ft. Myers → Tampa
01 · Services

What we fly.

Our lead service is HOA littoral-zone documentation. Everything else is built on the same principle: deliberate framing, repeatable results, and files your team can actually open, reference, and file away. A quick note on each below.

01

Littoral Zone Imaging

Florida law requires most HOAs to maintain the native shoreline vegetation around retention ponds, and documenting that vegetation well is harder than it sounds. Shorelines are overgrown, water-bordered, or fenced off, and walking them for photos takes hours that your property manager does not have. We fly the full perimeter of each pond at consistent altitude and hand back a dated visual record: the kind of evidence your lake-management vendor uses to plan treatment, your board references at the annual meeting, and your manager files when the county or insurance asks.

  • Retention ponds
  • Invasive species
  • Treatment records
  • Board reporting
02

Progress Documentation

Monthly or quarterly flyovers of active community projects: construction, renovations, landscape overhauls, long treatment windows. We fly the same altitude, angle, and framing on every visit, so your first image and your last image line up cleanly. Useful when you need to show the board what actually changed, when a contractor claim needs supporting evidence, or simply when a project runs long enough that memory alone stops being reliable.

03

Mapping & Orthomosaics

An orthomosaic is a stitched, measurement-accurate map built from dozens or hundreds of overlapping aerial photos. Unlike a casual drone shot, it is georeferenced, so your engineer or landscape architect can pull real distances and areas from it directly, the same way they would from a surveyor's plan. Useful for retention-pond inventories, erosion tracking, pre-construction site plans, or verifying what a vendor actually installed versus what they invoiced for.

04

Aerial Photography & Video

When a property, club, or campaign needs a hero shot, we can make one. Commercial real estate listings, club and community promotions, brand work, film and documentary inserts. We come from the documentary side of the industry, not the spec-shot side, which tends to mean slower, more thoughtful framing and footage that still reads well a few years after the shoot.

02 · Selected Work

A growing index.

New operation, active portfolio. Listed below are current and in-progress projects. Full imagery and case studies populate as jobs close.

Littoral Survey 27°21'N082°30'W320 AGL

Deer Creek

2025 littoral survey · Sarasota County

Orthomosaic 27°15'N082°33'W380 AGL

Siesta Key Chapel

Tree Foundation orthomosaic · Siesta Key

Commercial & Editorial Archive2023 to 2025Various

Selected commercial work

Editorial + brand aerials · Duplain Media archive

Open Capacity Your project here.

Booking · Summer 2026

Recurring HOA slots available

03 · About

A small, deliberate crew.

Duplain Aerials is the aerial arm of Duplain Media, a Sarasota-based film and documentary studio. We fly the same way we shoot: deliberately, framed, built to be referenced later, not just scrolled past.

Our lead service is littoral-zone documentation for Southwest Florida HOAs and the lake-management companies that serve them. Around that, we take on progress flyovers, orthomosaic mapping, and editorial aerial work for clients who want more than the stock drone shot.

Based in Sarasota. Working coast from Ft. Myers through Tampa and Lakeland.

Caleb Duplain · Lead Pilot
Field Operator · TBA
Second Unit · TBA
04 · Common Questions

What boards ask first.

A few of the questions that come up on the first call. If yours is not here, it goes at the top of our reply.

How quickly can you schedule a survey?

Most new Southwest Florida communities fly within two to three weeks of first contact, weather permitting. We do rush work when the calendar and the forecast cooperate. If your community is on a recurring monthly or quarterly schedule, those slots book further out, but that cadence also tends to be the cleaner way to budget and plan around treatment windows.

Are you insured? What is "Part 107?"

Part 107 is the FAA certification that allows a pilot to fly drones commercially in U.S. airspace. It requires passing an aeronautical knowledge exam and recurrent training. Hiring a non-certified pilot for paid work over your community is technically a federal violation, and your community association insurance may decline a related claim if something goes wrong. We are current on Part 107 and carry a $1M commercial liability policy. Before any flight, we issue a Certificate of Insurance listing your HOA and management company as additional insured, so your risk team has a paper trail.

Does the board need to approve before you fly?

In most cases, the commissioning party (board, property manager, or your lake-management vendor acting on behalf of the HOA) is authorization enough for flights over common areas. If your governing declarations require a specific homeowner notice or a board resolution before aerial work, we are happy to wait for those to be in place, and we can provide a short project brief to attach to the notice if that makes your job easier.

What do we actually receive at the end?

For a littoral survey, you get high-resolution stills of every pond perimeter, a board-ready PDF summary (the kind you can attach to a meeting packet), and a shared folder of the full capture that your lake-management vendor or county inspector can download if they need it. Mapping projects deliver georeferenced orthomosaics in whatever format your engineer or landscape architect uses. Photo and video work comes back as graded final files plus source footage, so nothing is locked to us if you want to repurpose it later.

Can you coordinate with our existing lake-management vendor?

Yes, and we strongly recommend it. We have nothing to sell that competes with your existing treatment contract. What we do provide is a neutral visual record your vendor can use to show the board that treatment is working, and that the HOA can use to verify the vendor is doing what they billed for. We often fly the week before treatment and again the week after, so everyone is working from the same set of before-and-after images.

What happens when Florida weather cancels a day?

We simply reschedule, at no charge. Florida weather is the main reason most aerial projects slip, and we build flex days into every scope of work. Sustained high winds, heavy rain, and low visibility are unsafe to fly in and also produce low-quality imagery, so the same window that keeps the drone safe also keeps your deliverables clean.

Do you fly over private homes?

Only the common areas, ponds, and amenities the HOA commissions. We do not linger over private yards or pools, and any incidental frames that capture a private home at recognizable resolution are cropped or blurred before the deliverable ships. If a homeowner ever has a specific concern, we are happy to share what we flew and what we delivered. Transparency tends to defuse this quickly.

05 · Contact

Request a survey.

A few details up front lets us come back with a fit, a window, and a number. Or email direct: info@duplainmedia.com.

Email info@duplainmedia.com
Studio duplainmedia.com
Base Sarasota, FL · 27°20'N 082°33'W