If you enjoy photography and taking spectacular aerial photos with your drone, why it’s a good idea to try and take photos that don’t scream “DRONE PHOTO” all over the place? This is what I want to achieve often when I launch my Mavic Pro in the air.
While one of the main reasons to do drone photos is to shoot from angles that would otherwise be impossible or just not practical, an aerial photo is a “special effect”. And effects and tricks are comoditized and become boring when they are used too much. To be honest, I see this a bit too much in most of the drone photos: drone is launched to maximum allowed altitude and a landscape is shot.
So, how can you use your drone in a creative way and avoid producing too generic drone photos? These are some of my tips.
A Sailboat entering Helsinki South Harbor
Go low
The idea is to get the photo from a new or surprising angle. It doesn’t have to be from a high altitude, you can make it look different by flying your drone low to a location and angle that wouldn’t be otherwise available.
Finns love saunas by the lake. Once upon a time someone built their dream sauna. But then time went by and something unfortunate happened and the sauna was left to deal with harsh Finnish winters all alone. So the famous crooked Sauna of Finland was created.
Get closer
Fly closer to your subject to make it stand out. Then it’s not often immediately obvious how you got your camera there and viewers just see a good photo and don’t focus too much how it was shot.
The Kallio church in Kallio district in Helsinki.
Steal focus with a super weird angle
While you could see that a certain photo is most likely shot with a drone, if the angle is somehow super weird, the fact that it’s an aerial photo taken with a drone doesn’t become the main point in it.
A highway cutting through a forest in Finland.
Adjust your angle just a little bit by using a drone
This photo below was shot with my drone. However the angle is almost the same you can get from a platform with a slightly longer lense with your DLSR. Using a drone gave just a little tweak to the angle; I just flew a little bit closer to the waterfall, remaining just about my own eye level on the viewing platform. Therefore the drone gave me an option to tweak my angle a little, get a bit closer to the waterfall and avoid making the photo look too “zoomed in”.
Keila-Joa Waterfalls in Estonia; a great location for one-day roadtrip from Tallinn.
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