Drone Photography: Why I LOVE It
If you’ve been following me on social media, then you’d know that recently I’ve been sharing a lot of images and some video from around the Ocean City Inlet that I captured using my drone.
Each year, it never fails that I say I’m going to fly my drone more, and then don’t follow through. This year, I can say that I WILL follow through, and my love of drone photography is why.
Drone photography is something that has come along way since it first came on the scene a few years ago, and I’ve found that many landscape and even wildlife photographers have begun to add drones their arsenal. Locally, some names include Elliot MacGuire, Kevin Lynam, and Jennifer Slack of Fractured Lens Photography.
The technology and capabilities of drones allow photographers so many new opportunities to portray scenes and landscapes - and that is part of what I love about it, and what we’ll be exploring in this blog post.
For starters, drones open up a whole new world of angles and perspectives for photographers to capture. Of course, you can always capture your favorite spots from now 20, 45, or even 100 feet in the air, but what about capturing it with the drone’s camera pointed straight down at a subject, like in the wave image above?
There are so many new opportunities and ways to photograph landscapes with a drone that a normal camera can’t. With those opportunities, come new chances for photographers to express their creativity. Going back to the wave image above for a moment, we can actually see just that.
When I took that photo, it was around I’d say 8:00 am, and the sun had only just come up about 15 - 20 minutes prior. From ground-level, I could have shown this with the sun peeking up over the waves. With the drone, I could have done something similar, but instead I opted to show it from this angle. To me, it added some directionality to the way the waves were coming toward the beach, as you can very clearly see the sunlight hitting the backs of the waves. At the same time, it allowed me to show how the sun, while casting some light onto the beach itself, hadn’t quite gotten high enough over the horizon to illuminate the whole thing. This type of creativity could only be achieved thanks to the drone, as otherwise I could not have captured this angle.
Sometimes, the drone’s ability to just to get higher off the ground is what a composition needs to go from good to great.
In my opinion, that’s the case with this image to the right of the jetty at the Ocean City Inlet. This composition, going down the jetty to the inlet marker, is famous and one I photographed once before from ground level with my DSLR.
With this image, though, I hovered the drone about 25 - 30 feet off the ground (at least, I think it was that high - I can’t remember to be honest). This additional height allowed me to position the sun directly behind the sign near the top, and use the light reflecting off the ocean as an extra element to emphasize the marker itself.
Finally, and I have not personally used my drone this way, but they can be used to capture some truly stunning wildlife photos and videos, especially of sea life like sharks and whales. I can’t really speak much to techniques here, since I haven’t done any drone work like this, but some great examples are:
Bertie Gregory: Pack of African Wild Dogs on the hunt
The Malibu Artist: His reels showing sharks and whales from above are all awesome, but this one of a manta ray near the surface is especially cool
There are countless other examples that I could recommend and the list would go on for a while, and frankly, I’m having a hard time choosing more to include! I think, though, that these two are absolute prime examples of what you can do with drones and wildlife - and just to go a step further, Bertie (who hosts two shows for National Geographic on Disney+), won an award at the British Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for an image he captured with his drone (check it out on Instagram here).
And that’s why I love drone photography! The possibilities and opportunities with drones are only just beginning, and as the technology continues to improve with time, there will only be more to come.
If you continue to follow along with my work this year, you’ll definitely be seeing more of the Delmarva Peninsula (and maybe some other places) from the sky.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and I’ll see you out there!
- Tyler
Don’t miss this other content from Tyler Smiley Photography:
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