Beth Anthony
Well-Known Member
mavic 4 pro over the farm and woods behind my house.
sunset over the farm
- Thread starter Beth Anthony
- Start date
Gary R. Smith
Well-Known Member
You seem to be enjoying your newly found "eagle eye"
Paul Taylor
Well-Known Member
It is amazing how drone technology has progressed over the years. I watch a few different motorsports - and they have camera drones fast enough to keep up with the cars/boats/etc - and it is amazing footage.
I have been tempted many times to buy one, but I always come to the realization rotating through my camera collection to keep them all exercised is enough work to do.
Wonderful gradients of color in that shot Beth!
I have been tempted many times to buy one, but I always come to the realization rotating through my camera collection to keep them all exercised is enough work to do.
Wonderful gradients of color in that shot Beth!
Beth Anthony
Well-Known Member
thanks gary. i've been playing around with drones for almost a decade now. but mostly at work and i can't share those photos. this is my 4th personal drone and the first one that i feel is capable of taking photos that i can print at a decent size and don't fall apart during editing.
thanks paul. my drone tops out at roughly 60 mph, but it will probably never go that fast in the real world. you'd have to have perfect flight conditions and a tail wind. some of the racing drones get up to 100mph. i'd love an fpv drone, but unless i get more into shooting video, i can't really justify it.
Gary Ayala
Well-Known Member
I've sorta been looking at drones. Your images don't help me not want to purchase one. Unfortunately, I don't have a forrest behind my house. My relunctance is that after a week ... the drone would most likely start collecting dust. For me, much of the lure of photography is the challenge of pre-visualizing then capturing the exceptional image. Not having owned or even played with a drone ... it is hard to transfer the challenges I face/feel when my hands grasp a camera ... to a camera floating a couple hundred feet in the sky. (I have little love for playing with videos.)
Beth Anthony
Well-Known Member
drone sensors and small and noisy and the images fall apart with a even just a little bit of editing. they're decent enough for small prints and posting on the internet, but i've wanted photos i can print large and sell since i got into drones. my latest drone is the first one that i felt was usable for larger prints. at this point i wouldn't recommend a drone for photography unless you want to spend $3-5k usd and spend a good deal of time learning how to fly safely.
having said that, i do more previsualization with drone shots than i do with my camera. i look at maps, topographic and satellite view to see what i want to shoot. there's a shot i want to get this year on vacation of the hills on rams horn road looking towards the tetons. you can't see it from the ground, but i know it's there.
i also use drones to scout locations i don't want to walk to unless i know there's a good shot. out west there's a few waterfalls that are close to a roadway, but with no real path down to them. do i want to spend 10 minutes scrambling through woods, undergrowth or brambles just to find out the waterfall is dried up and i spend 10 minutes finding my way back to the road? or spend 3 minutes in the air (if i'm in a spot where i can fly) to scout it and decide.
here's a few more drone shots from over the years.
2019 sword road in iceland. you only get this view from the sky. i found it on google maps by accident while i was planning the trip.
the view of needles hwy in south dakota from last year or the year before, i didn't manage to shoot wide enough to get all of the roadway in there. i want to reshoot this shot when i'm not running out of battery.
the truck in the farm behind my house from a few weeks ago. i could have easily shot this with a regular camera, but i was testing out the new drone and wanted to see how low i could go before the drone landed. i shot a boat today in the marsh. there's no good access to the boat by foot, and there's too much marsh grass to access it by boat. so i flew in to get the shot i wanted.
Gary Ayala
Well-Known Member
Thanks for the explanation of your methodology ... it has shinned a brighter light on drone photography.
