Drones or Aerial Photography Platforms

This week I want to talk about one of the latest styles in photography, drones or aerial photography platforms. As I am sure most of you are aware, drones have become more and more popular not only as a “toy” like the AirHogs for kids but also the professional drones like the DJI series, which are made for professional photography and cinematography.

This year for Christmas, if you went into ANY of the local stores here in the ATL area that carried RC items, all of them were sold out of drones about a week before Christmas. You’ll also know from my post last week that the FAA just started requiring drone owners to register themselves with the FFA and received a unique FAA ID in order to fly them legally even for hobby.

As someone who loves to photograph landscapes and my Forgotten Pieces of Georgia series, I am embracing the unique perspective you can obtain with a drone. I recently bought a fairly large unit called the Syma X8C, which is the same size and shape as the more popular DJI Phantom series, but at a fraction of the cost. I bought one of these models as most do as a starter drone to learn on and get used to the controls and flying in general. Now I AM planning to move up to the DJI Phantom 3 Advanced, which runs around $1,000 the first part of 2016. My little Syma came with a fairly low quality 2MP camera that can shoot videos and stills and do so from the radio transmitter, but you can modify the unit to carry the GoPro Hero 3+ and other such action cameras and I will be doing that mod to mine as soon as the parts arrive.

Now, what makes the DJI Phantom 3 such an expensive platform? Well the folks at DJI have purposely built the Phantom line with photographer’s in mind. It is capable of take off and landing on it’s own. You can upload GPS WayPoints to the drone to make it follow a specific route and shoot video or stills. It is basically a “smart drone” which means the machine itself can do ALL of the flying, while you the operator concentrate on just shooting with the onboard camera. The Phantoms can come equipped with a 12-16MP high resolution camera that can shoot anywhere from 2.7K to 4K HD video.

The Phantom units and some of the cheaper ones like mine also have FPV (First Person Viewing), which means it can beam what the camera sees live back to ground and onto your iPhone or Android device so you can use them as a remote Electronic Viewfinder and frame your shots properly. DJI’s drones are becoming especially popular with studios as a typical camera boom truck that a studio will rent for shooting a movie, runs around $60,000 a day to rent. Now this cost can be greatly reduced as the studio can buy even the most expensive Inspire 1 professional cinematography drone from DJI at $5,000 a piece and get the same shots they would get with that boom truck for way less money. They can buy 5 or 6 of these drones and use them over and over for movie after movie.

So, how good are the DJI Phantom photography platforms? Well look at the images here or videos online and jude for yourself. Here is a beautiful video from Kauai, HA and he shot all of it on the Phantom 3 Professional at 4K HD video.





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