We were lucky to catch up with BG Boyd recently and have shared our conversation below.

BG, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s talk about social media – do you manage your own or do you have someone or a company that handles it for you? Why did you make the choice you did?

I run my social media accounts myself and honestly it is pretty draining and I really only do the bare minimum right now.

I am a computer programmer so I was able to write a neat program to allow me to post to many of the social media platforms all at once, which was nice. That has changed though and it is harder and harder to maintain that api access.

There has been a mass exodus from twitter, Instagram is mostly spam, and Facebook is mostly ads.

In summary, I guess my view is that social media is toxic and on the whole, bad for society and I use it sparingly now just to keep the lights on, so to speak. I’ve had most of my success from word of mouth and found that spending time and money on social media isn’t worth it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve been taking photos since around 2010. Right before Covid struck, I decided that it was time to check out drones. I became FAA Part 107 certified early on because I wanted to make sure I understood the rules. During COVID-19, when everything was shutting down, I tried to devise an idea to keep me busy. While driving around town, I started to really notice some of the giant murals we had and found my idea.

I merged aerial photography and my coding knowledge with my appreciation of the arts to create a website, tucsonazmurals.com. I wrote the website from the ground up myself and provide virtually all of the photos and videos of the murals, most of which were all taken via drone. There are now over 310 murals documented on the website by over 140 different artists!

In addition to the murals website, I mostly focus on providing affordable aerial photography and videography for Tucson causes and community events for organizations such as SAACA, Friends of PACC, TMC Healing Art, Rare Disease Day, Rock the Spot, and the Vail School District.

I am also available for other aerial jobs and I have been very fortunate to work with SkyPod Images to participate in several events at The University of Arizona over the past few years.

In the process of documenting murals for tucsonazmurals.com, I have been lucky to meet and talk to several muralists such as Ignacio Garcia, Jessica Gonzales, Joe Pagac, Ruben Urrea Moreno, and Alejandra Trujillo. There is a video out there somewhere of me flying my drone through Joe’s car while he was working on a mural!

In line with my desire to help local organizations I have recently joined the board of the Southern Arizona Arts & Cultural Alliance (SAACA) and I am very excited to become more involved with the art in Tucson and doing my part to help spread the word about local art.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice

Haha. I am glad I stayed away from that. Didn’t it all come crashing down recently?

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I’ve actually recently had a few people tell me that they really like my work and what I am doing and that others have even discussed it amongst themselves and are excited to get me involved in future projects. That was really cool.

Contact Info:

• Website: bgboydphoto.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/bgboydphoto
• Facebook: facebook.com/bgboydphoto
• Twitter: twitter.com/bgboydphoto
• Youtube: youtube.com/bgboydphoto
• Other: tucsonazmurals.com

Image Credits
All images are my own.