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In the previous article in this series, I elaborated on the compositional advantages of the drone compared to land-based shooting. I claimed that the drone offers infinitely more compositional opportunities, which results from the fact that the photographer isn’t bound to the ground. This allows better perspectives and separation of the compositional elements.

In this article I’d like to talk about two more advantages of shooting with a drone, which particularly relate to the comparison with manned-aircraft based shooting: the drone’s availability and its ability to take off and land anywhere.

The Springs of Ojos Del Campo, Argentina. The only way of seeing this scene from the air is using a drone. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/400 sec, F8, ISO 100. Puna De Argentina

Availability and Running Costs

I would be remiss if I neglected to state that in tandem with its ability to fly, the drone’s availability is the very thing that made the drone change the world of photography forever.

Today’s drones are amazing machines. An idiot-proof, tiny, light, foldable quad-copter can easily fit in your photo bag with several spare batteries and the remote control, while leaving room for a your entire DSLR and lens arsenal. Each of these batteries can last for up to half an hour (!) of flight. Under favorable conditions, you can send the drones 5 kilometers or more away and 500 meters high while maintaining connection (in theory, that is, as it’s illegal in most countries to fly higher than 120m and out of sight).

An aerial perspective exposes the beautiful contour and layers of the shore of the Dead Sea. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/20 sec, F4, ISO 200. Ein Gedi, Israel

You can bring a drone with you to any shoot, fly it in any terrain and in harsher weather that you think. You can fly it while sitting comfortably inside a heated car, with the spare batteries charging quickly as you fly. It’s portable enough to hike or even climb with. For the experienced drone user, it can take less than 3 minutes to set up and be airborne, when time is of the essence.

This light on the top of a huge iceberg was disappearing and reappearing with the horizon clouds obscuring the sun to the north west. With the drone, I had the choice of when exactly to fly to optimize my photography and get the best light. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/30 sec, F7.1, ISO 100. Kangia Fjord, Greenland

Needless to say, a manned aircraft is not always available. Some natural landscapes one wishes to shoot are far in the back country with no airport or heliport nearby. With a drone, you are free from these worries. An hour of flight in a Cessna can cost hundreds of dollars, and yours truly has once been given a quote of $ 4200 per hour (Or $ 70 per minute. Yes, that’s right) for a helicopter flight. Flying a drone is virtually free.

This river of lava burst out of the mountain side before my eyes. After picking up my jaw from the floor, I grabbed my drone and sent it right to the source of the flow. DJI Phantom 4 Pro, 1/100 sec, F6.3, ISO 400. Kilauea Volcano, Island of Hawaii

Ability to take off and land anywhere

This ability is a particular aspect of the drone’s unmatched availability. Due to the drone’s minuscule size, it is not only possible to fit it in a camera bag, take it out and have it airborne within minutes. It is actually possible to do so without the need for a helipad – or any kind of takeoff/landing surface whatsoever – after a bit of training, takeoff and landing can be done from the pilot’s hand. This often neglected fact can make a world of difference when the area a photographer is based in is something like a small boat, a place with uneven ground (for example a lava-field or snowy earth) or a roofed area such as a cave.

A typical Targa speed boat in Greenland. There’s no really comfortable place to take off or land, but there’s plenty of space to do so from the pilot’s (or someone else’s) hand.

Taking off from a boat isn’t easy, especially when the open area is crowded or too small. Boats often are loaded with antennas, which makes takeoff from the roof problematic. But the photographer can launch the drone from his hand while standing in the front or back of the boat, thus giving the drone the necessary space for a safe takeoff.

Hand-landing on a boat is a bit more challenging, to say the least. The pilot needs to direct the drone slowly and carefully toward the boat’s open space, then catch the drone in midair by hand. This can be difficult in a number of ways. Firstly, boats tend to sway side to side, and the drone is ideally fixed in its aerial position, thus its course relative to the boat is chaotic. Secondly, the drone’s sensors tend to block it from getting too close the pilot’s hand. Luckily, the sensors can be disabled.

This boat had a much more comfortable open space to take off and land, but it was challenging nevertheless.

Personally, I’ve had more than my share of less-than-pleasant experiences when hand-landing a drone on boats. While the DJI Phantom series has handle-like landing gear which makes it very easy to catch the drone, the Mavic series does not, and a lot can go wrong when trying to maneuver and catch the drone while standing on a swaying boat. The propellers can cut and bruise your fingers or cut through your clothes, and a wrong movement or failure to catch the drone can result in it hitting the boat or worse – taking a nosedive into the water.

A gigantic arched iceberg dwarfs our boat in Disko Bay, Greenland. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/30 sec, F8, ISO 100

There’s not much that can be done about this other than practice taking off and landing the drone from your hand. Remember that while a drone can be lost at any moment, images last forever.

For a bit more about flying from a boat, check out my friend Ian’s video about our trip to Greenland earlier this year. Ian suffered a brutal attack by his drone, but survived to tell the tale! Yours truly had plenty of drone fails as well, and the shenanigans meter was on the high side throughout the trip.

In the next article I will conclude the discussion of the drone’s advantages with perhaps the most exciting of its traits: the ability to remain totally fearless in the face of danger!

Erez Marom is a professional nature photographer, photography guide and traveler based in Israel. You can follow Erez’s work on Instagram and Facebook, and subscribe to his mailing list for updates.

If you’d like to experience and shoot some of the world’s most fascinating landscapes with Erez as your guide, take a look at his unique photography workshops in The Lofoten Islands, Greenland, Namibia, the Argentinean Puna, the Faroe Islands and Ethiopia.

Erez offers video tutorials discussing his images and explaining how he achieved them.

More in This Series:

• Landscape Photography with a Drone – Part 1: Forward / What is a Drone?
• Landscape Photography with a Drone – Part 2: Advantages of the Drone (i)

Selected Articles by Erez Marom:

• Parallelism in Landscape Photography
• Winds of Change: Shooting changing landscapes
• Behind the Shot: Dark Matter
• On the Importance of Naming Images
• On Causality in Landscape Photography
• Shooting K?lauea Volcano, Part 1: How to melt a drone
• The Art of the Unforeground
• Whatever it Doesn’t Take
• Almost human: photographing critically endangered mountain gorillas

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

In the first article of this series I explained what drones are, how they are built and controlled by the user. The next question to naturally arise is “Why does one need a drone?” What is a drone good for, and why should you get one?

The answer to this question is long and complicated, but could be summed up by saying that a drone gives the photographer opportunities for shots not achievable in any other way. That’s quite the statement, but I stand firmly behind it, and I intend to explain this position in depth in this article and in the ones to follow.

The first order of business would be to compare the drone to the ubiquitous tool of the photographer: the DSLR, or any hand-held camera for that matter. Indeed, I have written extensively about the advantages of aerial photography in a previous series, but that was in the context of hand-held shooting from an aircraft, and in any case, these advantages need to be presented here if this series is to be self-contained. I’ll rephrase them shortly in a way that better relates to droning.

What the drone offers compared to ground-based shooting is as follows: you have a miniature friggin’ helicopter in your hands, and it allows you to shoot aerials, get the shots from any angle, get there quickly and safely, all without any real danger to your body (caveats to that coming in the future).

Need to separate compositional elements that overlap from the ground? No problemo – take the drone higher and viola – objects are separated. Want to shoot flowing lava without burning your ears off? The drone feels no pain. Can’t walk on water? Can’t breathe toxic fumes? Can’t fly? Too lazy to hike? Send the drone. You get the idea, let’s explore some examples.

Infinite Perspectives

Landscape photography is all about composition – the base layer to any image. Good light and colors are nice, but without an underlying arrangement of objects that’s appealing to the eye, you have nothing. An aerial perspective and the choice over the height, angle and distance from which an image is taken allow for an unprecedented degree of control over composition.

The towers of this ice-castle fit perfectly in the dents in the cloud-cover. I took the drone up to a height which would show this concordance, yet allow separation of the elements. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/30 sec, F8, ISO 100. Disko Bay, Greenland

Natural elements often look totally different from the ground level and from the air, but it’s also true that different aerial angles also result in completely distinct compositions. The two images below are the same exact iceberg. Both were taken from the air during one shoot. Would you have guessed? This goes to show the extent of diversity offered by shooting from the air.

More examples: Mount Zinn is a beautiful mesa erosion-mountain in Israel. Taking the drone around it during morning twilight and sunrise resulted in several distinct compositions.

Hidden parts of the photographed natural elements can be discovered and conveyed to the viewer in a visually pleasing way when shooting them from the air. It’s sometimes unbelievable how many phenomenal features are hidden in plain sight, simply because we lack the aerial perspective.

This amazing whirlpool was hiding about 10-20 meters from where I was standing. There was no way I could’ve detected or shot it without the drone. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/80 sec, F4, ISO 100. Haukland Beach, the Lofoten Islands, Arctic Norway

Top-down shooting, albeit sometimes over-done, can also be a good creative tool for imagery. It doesn’t always work, though – bear that in mind when trying it.

Amazing natural colors and patterns in the Argentinean high-altitude desert. Shooting this top-down gave the image a painting-like appearance. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/240 sec, F9, ISO 100. Puna De Argentina

Lava surface-flows in Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii. A top-down perspective resulted in a deliberate lack of depth, which in turn allowed me to concentrate the viewer on the shape of the flows. DJI Phantom 4 Pro, 1/25 sec, F6.3, ISO 400. Taken outside of Volcanoes NP, Island of Hawaii.

Separation

A specific aspect of composition is the separation between the different compositional elements. Separation serves to make the composition more appealing. Not having subjects obscured by others is satisfying for the eye, and helps the image have a cleaner, more ordered feel.

A gigantic iceberg floating in Disko Bay, Greenland. The position of the iceberg meant is was impossible to get separation of its two parts when still showing the light passing through the arch and hitting the back segment from the water level. Another clear advantage is the fact that the submerged part of the iceberg is beautifully showing, in addition to debris from a recent collapse in the arch. DJI Mavic II Pro, vertical stitch, 1/40 sec, F6.3, ISO 100

Separation is especially important where the photographer struggles to convey the grandeur of a location. When shooting Cono Arita (see below) from the ground, it’s impossible to convey the cone’s true shape or its place in the salt flat, not to mention separate it from other elements.

Cono Arita is a sandstone hill in the middle of the Arizaro salt flat in the Argentinean Puna (high-altitude desert). When morning light strikes, the beautiful shadow is cast upon the plain. Taking the drone up allowed me to show this, while creating separation between the cone, its shadow and the surrounding hills and mountains. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/60 sec, F8, ISO 100. Salar De Arizaro, Argentina

Just as a ground-based photographer tries to separate his or her foreground and background, the aerial photographer has the same exact considerations – only many more options, as the height constraint is relaxed. See, for example, the near-far composition below.

Separation doesn’t always mean the subjects aren’t touching – it can mean a subtler expansion of the distances between the subjects, to create a more pleasant arrangement.

I used the aerial perspective to expand the distances between these interlacing hills and their shadows at sundown. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/60 sec, F10, ISO 100. Desierto Del Labirinto, Puna De Argentina

In the next article, I will continue discussing the advantages of the drone, specifically its availability.

Erez Marom is a professional nature photographer, photography guide and traveler based in Israel. You can follow Erez’s work on Instagram and Facebook, and subscribe to his mailing list for updates.

If you’d like to experience and shoot some of the world’s most fascinating landscapes with Erez as your guide, take a look at his unique photography workshops in The Lofoten Islands, Greenland, Namibia, the Argentinean Puna, the Faroe Islands and Ethiopia.

Erez offers video tutorials discussing his images and explaining how he achieved them.

More in This Series:

• Landscape Photography with a Drone – Part 1: Forward / What is a Drone?

Selected Articles by Erez Marom:

• Parallelism in Landscape Photography
• Winds of Change: Shooting changing landscapes
• Behind the Shot: Dark Matter
• On the Importance of Naming Images
• On Causality in Landscape Photography
• Shooting K?lauea Volcano, Part 1: How to melt a drone
• The Art of the Unforeground
• Whatever it Doesn’t Take
• Almost human: photographing critically endangered mountain gorillas

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)