In the previous articles in this series, I elaborated about the advantages of the drone, specifically that the drone offers more compositional opportunities, is cheap to run, portable, available anywhere and able to hover in place.
In this article I`d like to conclude the discussion of the drone`s advantages by mentioning its ability to hover in place and its most fun facet: its fearlessness in the face of danger.
Ability to hover
The ability to effortlessly hover in place is unique to the drone. True, good helicopter pilots can hover efficiently, but neither with the same GPS-controlled accuracy as the drone, nor with its ability to go near the subject. In terms of stability, a drone can only be compared to a tripod in the sky, which in turn means that it allows three things: relatively long exposures, parking abilities and immaculate precision.
Long exposures can be useful when the photographer wants to convey a sense of motion in an image. For example, an exposure of half a second or more can smear moving water, creating pleasing lines and a clear feel in an image. Under sufficiently still weather, a modern drone can shoot sharp images at half a second, a second or even more. Multiple attempts can result in a sharp shot even when shooting a several second long exposure - an unprecedented achievement for any aerial shooing (that doesn`t use a heavy, expensive gyro-stabilizer).
A long exposure of Fossa waterfall, Faroe Islands. If I had an ND filter handy, I could`ve extended the exposure even more. DJI Mavic II Pro, 1/2 sec, F11, ISO 100.
I`ll explain and demonstrate what I mean by `parking abilities` with an image I took earlier this year. I was shooting the total solar eclipse over lake Cuesta Del Viento, in the San Juan province of Argentina. Totality lasted for a mere 2 minutes (which seemed more like 45 seconds), during which I tried to shoot a wide-angle focus-stack, a telephoto closeup of the corona, a ...
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