Up in the air

Hav­ing vis­it­ed the High­lands of Ice­land a few times before, and see­ing some of the images that can be had from a high­er per­spec­tive, I was moti­vat­ed to acquire a drone for the first time this year. I bought one of the cheap­est and small­est drones you can get. It weighs less than 250 grams and fits in my cam­era bag, tak­ing no more room than a 24 – 70 lens. That means it is always with me and eas­i­ly deployed. Should I see an oppor­tu­ni­ty, then I would be able to grab it.

Despite my best inten­tions to prac­tice before using it on a pho­tog­ra­phy tour, I nev­er actu­al­ly got around to doing much. I man­aged a cou­ple of quick flights from my gar­den to take some shots of the house from above, I watched an hour-long YouTube video on how to oper­ate it, and last­ly, con­sul­ta­tions with friends who have drones to gar­ner some top tips. At the end of the day, I thought it was not ter­ri­bly dif­fi­cult, and my first trip being in the High­lands of Ice­land, apart from moun­tains and hills, there wasn’t that much to crash into, so I wasn’t over­ly concerned.

When launch­ing your drone into the air, you often do not have any idea as to what you will see. You could be stand­ing in front of a big rock face or hill and sim­ply won­der what is over the oth­er side. In the High­lands of Ice­land, you can be fair­ly sure it will be some­thing inter­est­ing, and so it was on this occa­sion. The drone lift­ed to about 30 metres, and I start­ed fly­ing it away from me.

Over the ridge in front of me, after about five min­utes, was a large expanse of black vol­canic sand stretch­ing out a long way with some very inter­est­ing hills in the dis­tance that were hug­ging the edge of a lake. 

The hills and lake are suf­fi­cient­ly dom­i­nant in the image and are clear­ly the key ele­ments of the com­po­si­tion. Anoth­er lake, to the right, had revealed itself and formed a per­fect echo of the main one I had been tar­get­ing. The lighter sand on the vol­canic ridge pro­vid­ed a per­fect­ly posi­tioned curve that leads into the image and is graph­i­cal­ly dom­i­nant. Being clos­er, I could see gor­geous tex­tures and fea­tures in the land­scape below. As one of my first images using a drone, I was very con­tent. Using a drone gives a new per­spec­tive on this land­scape, giv­ing you van­tage points you could nev­er gain on foot. This image real­ly does reflect the wild­ness and beau­ty of this unique landscape.