Photography tips

The Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the ground or hovering 300 feet above—the fundamentals of photography still apply. Even so, using a drone does pose some challenges while also offering special opportunities that you won’t encounter on terra firma.

Below are some basic principles and advice for shooting still images using a drone. Practice and experimentation are essential for elevating your work, so to speak.  

 

Lighting and shadows

  • Photographers know that lighting is everything, and that still applies to drone-captured images. The standard advice that the golden hours around sunset and sunrise are generally most favorable still holds true. The warmer light and the lengthy shadows can make all the difference.
  • However, I’ve also found that shadows can sometimes be a problem when shooting photos with a drone. For example, many rivers are situated in canyons, so the shadows can be extreme and may obscure too much of the scene.
  • On flights with challenging lighting conditions, consider bracketing with multiple exposures (some drones will do this automatically).
 
The Dolores River in southwest Colorado.

Composition

  • Vary altitude, angle, and zoom: experiment with different elevations and vantage points to create a variety of compositions. Lower altitudes often reveal more texture, depth, and foreground detail. Shooting straight down can yield interesting patterns.
  • Rule of thirds: many cameras have an option for turning on grid lines that follow the rule of thirds, which divides your image with two horizontal lines and two vertical lines. Often, it’s more visually appealing to align your subject along one of the lines or at an intersection, rather than centering it. That said, this is a rule that’s meant to be broken and not an ironclad commandment.
 
The Rio Pueblo de Taos meets the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico.
  • Leading lines: One of the most effective ways to guide the viewer’s eye is to use natural or human-made lines in the frame. For my work on water issues, rivers are a natural choice here, but so are roads, railroad tracks, levees, and irrigation canals. Leading lines can direct attention toward a subject and give your image more depth.
 
The Rio Grande in central New Mexico.
  • Patterns and symmetry: The drone’s-eye view often reveals intriguing patterns on the ground or water below. In a natural environment, forests, fields, crops, and water bodies can look even more compelling when you’re shooting from straight above them. In a built environment, streets and landscape architecture can also generate striking patterns and symmetry.
Elephant Butte Reservoir in southern New Mexico.
  • Contrasts: From above, contrasts in the landscape may be more apparent. This could be due to human activity, such as irrigating cropland, or natural causes, such as the local geology and vegetation.
 
The Green River in eastern Utah.

Camera settings

  • I always format my memory card before flying so that I’m starting with the maximum amount of space and it’s easier to deal with file transfer later (but be sure you’re not erasing anything of value when you format the card).
  • Before taking off, I make sure that I’m shooting in RAW so that I’m capturing as much information as possible and giving myself more flexibility in the editing process.
  • Enabling the histogram, which shows a graph of your image’s brightness, can let you see if the exposure is OK. Some cameras will highlight areas that are overexposed, which can be helpful.
  • Using the camera’s auto function may suit your needs, but for full control, you’ll want to adjust ISO and shutter speed manually. I generally shoot with as low an ISO as possible to minimize digital noise and also go for a fast shutter to freeze motion, though a slower speed may be useful in some situations to create a blurring effect.
  • Auto white balance has generally worked well for me, but a fixed setting can produce more consistent color across a series of images made during the same flight.
 

File organization and backup

  • I’ve learned the hard way that it pays to set up a solid system for organizing your photos and footage. Without a workflow, it’s easy to get confused and lose files. It’s also difficult to subsequently find material you’re looking for unless you’ve done something to date and name your imagery.
  • Be sure to back up your work. I copy files from memory cards to portable hard drives, and I use Dropbox for cloud storage of finished images/videos.
  • No one wants to think about crashing or losing a drone, but it happens, and that could potentially cause a total loss of everything you’ve captured on the memory card. Accordingly, I will sometimes back up content between locations, or even battery changes, to make sure the imagery survives even if the drone doesn’t.
  • Create an online platform to showcase your imagery. For my work with The Water Desk, we set up a photo-sharing site (waterdesk.photos) through SmugMug and organized the contents by state. For videos, I’ve tended to use Vimeo to store and share footage.
  • Saving your metadata, including GPS coordinates, altitude, and camera settings, is essential if you wish to revisit a location and replicate a shot when the season or conditions have changed. Geotagging images will also enable them to be integrated into data visualizations.
  • Imagery for journalism will require a caption, so make sure you have the details you’ll need to write an accurate and informative description.
 
 
Uranium mill tailings pile along the Colorado River in Moab, Utah.