I’ve been trying my hands at the free DJI Flight Simulator for the last couple of weeks in hopeful anticipation of getting a drone soon (fingers crossed on that) and recently I got my hands on the Mavic Air 2 and the flight changed my perception on photography in general.
The view from above completely changes your perceptive of/on any given environment and this makes for interesting takes on aerial portraits/ landscape photography and cinematography (but as I am not an expert on cinematography at the moment, we’ll leave this conversation for another time).
Training on the DJI simulator does a lot to prepare you for real-world flight in terms of stick controls and flight feel but still, it doesn’t stop you from being totally blown away when it comes to real-world flying. Coming from the standard human POV, there’s not much that motivates me and after a couple of months of living in a certain space, there’s very little that can surprise me any longer but once I achieved lift-off, the environment that I thought I had completely milked of ideas looked totally new and beaming with new possibilities. Below is the standard look off my balcony versus how the drone portrayed it.
There’s still so much I have to uncover about thIS genre of photography but right off the back, I can say it’s not for people who engage in pixel peeping (and I’m unfortunately one of those people). Unless you’re going for the really high-end drones (Mavic 3 Pro, Inspire Series, and Matrice 30T series…) then you can’t expect to get DSLR levels of details in your shots but unless you’re planning on doing dodge and burn on aerial portraits (which would be crazy), you’d be fine.
I’d keep flying the simulator (which is completely free and can be downloaded on the DJI website here) and getting ready for that drone’s arrival. Check out my take on the new DJI Avata here.
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All Images were taken by Ufana Ishoyor and used with Permission.
