Drones offer the opportunity to experience buildings in a way that isn’t humanly possible without them. They give a brand new and unique point of view over the world.
You should consider a drone as another camera lens that you carry with you.
Operating a drone is not that easy. In order to get outstanding, high-quality content out of your drone you’ll need time and effort to practice and get to know how to fly properly and safely.
When and where you are flying really matters.
Flying a drone in a dense urban area is a lot more challenging and dangerous than in a rural area or in a bay.
Flying at night versus during the day is a great way to get those great night-time cityscape shots, but as you might imagine, it is a bit tricky to fly a drone when you can’t really see it.
Drone architectural photography will give you a new perspective of your subject. The shots can vary from angle to angle. The drone can move through different elevation levels. The shots will be more precise as the drone can move close to the subject. There is no limit to the angles, height and perspectives to discover.
A piece of advice for drone photography is to know exactly what sort of shots you’re going to get or want to get before you even take off. That’s because drones currently have a fairly limited amount of battery life so it is always best to know where you want to shoot and what kind of shots you want to get.
When I shoot with my drone the first thing that I do is putting a circular polarizer filter on the drone camera lens. Especially on bright, sunny days, it helps to reduce glare from direct reflections in your surrounding and provides colour and contrast enhancement, giving a bit more richness to the greens and blues; it also acts as a protector for the lens.
In architectural photography, the main goal is to show a visual representation of a building, infrastructure or a small urban neighbourhood. As such, if you continue to use traditional tools, you will be limited only to ground-based shots.
Drone shots can allow you to understand the scale of cities, the size of landmarks compared to other buildings and the design of urban planning.
Drones are still relatively new so not everything has been photographed from an aerial perspective…yet.