Drone photography

A drone works in a band of height which was never available before: ten to a hundred metres. Below it a ladder or a mast reaches. Above it a helicopter or a plane starts, and the ground turns into a map. In between, a roof, a boat, a field or a car park still reads as itself and also reads as a shape.

From straight down there is no horizon, so the usual cues for depth are gone. Shadow replaces them. A low sun turns every chimney, tree, mast and person into a long dark line across the surface, and those lines are what make a flat view read as three dimensional.

Give the altitude in metres and the angle. Forty metres straight down for pattern, or eighty metres at 45 degrees for a view which keeps some horizon.

Name the sun. Say low evening or early morning sun, and say the shadows run long across the surface.

Say what the pattern is made of: roof lines, boat wakes, field strips, salt pans, a crowd, a car park. A top down frame needs graphic content, because it has no foreground.

Use it for a coastline, a harbour, a terrace of roofs, a quarry, a flooded field, a market, a crowd, a road through forest.

Leave it alone when the subject has a face. Straight down on a person gives the top of a head, and forty metres is too far to say anything about them.

Cinema publishes Aerial as the view from a helicopter or a plane: high, wide, moving, and with the horizon in it. Cinema also publishes FPV Drone, which is the opposite of both, a fast first person flight which dives through gaps and rolls. This entry sits between them: one still frame, held steady, from ten to a hundred metres.

Landscape photography stands on the ground and needs a foreground one metre from the lens. A drone frame has no foreground at all, and pattern does that work instead.

A flat lay in the commercial set points straight down at objects on a table from half a metre. A drone runs the same geometry on a field, a car park or a beach.

Consumer drone photography starts with the DJI Phantom 2 Vision in 2013. Until then the top down frame needed a helicopter, a mast or a kite. Legal limits in the United Kingdom and the European Union cap normal flight at 120 metres, so the whole genre now works in a band which ends well below where aerial photography used to begin.

A horizon appears in a frame which was supposed to point straight down. Say the camera points straight down at 90 degrees, and say no horizon is visible.

The frame comes back flat and grey because the sun sits overhead. Say low evening sun, and say the shadows run long across the surface.