Does a drone distance you from the landscape?

I had an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion whilst in the High­lands of Ice­land recent­ly con­cern­ing the use of drones. The ques­tion was: can you make the same con­nec­tion with the image you do with a con­ven­tion­al camera?

I have come to drone pho­tog­ra­phy rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly. Paul has been using a drone for many years now, and I was mild­ly inter­est­ed in the images he was cre­at­ing. I have vis­it­ed this area many times and was quite sat­is­fied with the images that I have made pre­vi­ous­ly. How­ev­er, on our annu­al vis­it to the High­lands of Ice­land last year, I thought that per­haps anoth­er way of respond­ing to the land­scape would be via a drone. Not cap­tur­ing video, but sin­gle images with­out resort­ing to the ubiq­ui­tous look­ing direct­ly down on the land­scape com­mon in many braid­ed riv­er images made famous by Iceland’s landscape.

Whilst you can tra­verse many parts of the High­lands armed with a long lens to reach the dis­tant views, there are still many areas that you sim­ply can­not access unless you are will­ing to chal­lenge your­self to a long walk. The drone revealed a land­scape I hadn’t pre­vi­ous­ly under­stood was there. There was a net­work of lakes and rivers inter­spersed between vol­canic rem­nants, mounds, hills and many extinct vol­canic craters.

Last year, it is true to say that I was not real­ly con­nect­ing with the land­scape when fly­ing my drone. I man­aged to cap­ture a selec­tion of images that I was pleased with. I wouldn’t sug­gest that this was sim­ply luck, but I would say I was for­tu­nate. I man­aged to fly in the right direc­tion and encounter some inter­est­ing scenes and frame them. 

This year was dif­fer­ent. I had upgrad­ed to a more pow­er­ful and capa­ble machine and was some­what more expe­ri­enced in fly­ing the drone. I didn’t need to think about using the con­trols or wor­ry about los­ing or crash­ing the drone. In short, I could focus on the image I want­ed to cap­ture. This is equal­ly true for still pho­tog­ra­phy with a cam­era. Becom­ing famil­iar and con­fi­dent in the kit you use, you can assign all your atten­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty to mak­ing the image. Hav­ing a more capa­ble drone, that is, a much longer fly­ing time, meant that I could relax and take my time. This is impor­tant. As with all pho­tog­ra­phy, if you can take your time, you allow your­self to ​‘see’ more. It allows you to respond more deeply to the landscape.

This year, I spent more time sur­vey­ing the land­scape around me, con­sid­er­ing where the best oppor­tu­ni­ties might lie, and reflect­ing on the best posi­tion for the drone to be in. Seek­ing out images was more inten­tion­al. Spend­ing more time in the vicin­i­ty of my tar­get area allowed me to explore dif­fer­ent angles and per­spec­tives and ulti­mate­ly com­pose the image I want­ed. I also had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to hov­er in an area and allow the winds to push the clouds around, deliv­er­ing dif­fer­ent light­ing con­di­tions in the same area. The pre­vi­ous year I had large­ly been fly­ing around look­ing for pho­tographs. Now I was spend­ing more time try­ing to under­stand what the land­scape was offer­ing and decid­ing how I want­ed to respond to it.

I must con­fess that the expe­ri­ence is not quite the same as using a con­ven­tion­al cam­era. When stand­ing with a cam­era, there is wind, tem­per­a­ture, sound, scale, phys­i­cal ter­rain, and the embod­ied expe­ri­ence of being there. With the drone, some of those things dis­ap­pear. But oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties appear: move­ment through space, dis­cov­er­ing rela­tion­ships invis­i­ble from ground lev­el, chang­ing view­point almost con­tin­u­ous­ly, and see­ing the struc­ture of the land­scape rather than mere­ly expe­ri­enc­ing it from with­in. More­over, the scale of the High­lands is made more pow­er­ful using the ele­va­tion of a drone. Per­haps con­nec­tion doesn’t require phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty. It requires atten­tion and revelation.

Becom­ing more pro­fi­cient and expe­ri­enced with the drone, and con­struct­ing an image grad­u­al­ly becomes more nat­ur­al. I sus­pect that using the tech­nol­o­gy itself will increas­ing­ly dis­ap­pear from the process, much like a con­ven­tion­al cam­era as famil­iar­i­ty sets in. That, in future, will allow my response to the land­scape to be expe­ri­enced more strongly.

Hav­ing been a pho­tog­ra­ph­er most of my life, I am at a point where I increas­ing­ly feel the need to chal­lenge famil­iar ways of mak­ing pho­tographs and explore dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing. Using a drone is one such path, and it has kin­dled an excite­ment and new sat­is­fac­tion in my pho­tog­ra­phy. The drone doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­tance you from the land­scape. It changes the way in which you encounter it.