aerial photography

If you’re a drone photographer you know that drone photos suffer from a fairly-predictable set of issues. Haze affecting sky color and contrast, noise due to the small sensor on consumer drones, lack of shadow detail, and often lifeless colors. If you’re shooting Raw (typically DNG for drones), then you’ve also got to deal with fixing lens distortion. All of that is doable in a good photo editing app, and something we’ve written about before. But now there is a super-simple way to get excellent quality from your drone photos with a single click. Skylum (makers of Luminar and Aurora HDR) have launched AirMagic. At $39, it’s definitely worth trying out to see if it should be part of your arsenal. Pre-orders before March 21 also receive some additional goodies. You can read my full hands-on review, including image comparisons on ExtremeTech.

What I love most about drone panoramas is that they combine a unique way to show a location with being dead simple to shoot once you have a good workflow. Now that they are natively-supported by Facebook and purpose-built sites like Kuula.co, friends can get a sense of where you’ve been more easily than ever. There are a variety of approaches that will work, and I’ve outlined some of them, along with tips and my workflow in a How-to piece for ExtremeTech.com.

Whether you are learning to improve your drone flying to qualify for a commercial opportunity or simply to have more fun, it can be an expensive process involving trial, error, and crashes. It’s also hard to quantify your progress. Zephyr is an impressive drone simulation environment for the PC that lets you advance your flying skills from the comfort of your armchair. Using a controller that closely mimics the controller for your drone, you can fly through a wide variety of training lessons or just free fly in any of several nicely-crafted landscapes.

If you’ve been stalling on getting into the fun hobby of drone photography, DJI has come up with another reason not to. Its new Mavic Air combines some of the very best features of the amazingly-popular Mavic Pro with the diminutive Spark. I’ve written up our first impressions over at ExtremeTech. For serious photographers, I think the Mavic Pro still offers some big advantages, like more flight time, faster lens, and possibly more support for advanced video modes like D-Log (although the Air might also support those). Most of the fancy photography features of the new Air will help you get started quickly, but won’t do much for those of us who already shoot RAW and use Litchi for our panoramas. The 32MP built-in panorama mode certainly isn’t a match for custom panos like the one below I built out of 46 RAW images using Photoshop and Hugin. But for $799 a smaller version of the Mavic Pro is a welcome addition to the DJI line for anyone who has been on the fence about taking the plunge!

There is plenty of information on the web about drone photography, but I’ve learned from experience that it is spread far and wide, and it can be very time consuming to get the bits you need. It can also be expensive if you order the wrong drone or even worse crash your drone because you were missing a key piece of information (yep, done that). So we’ve put together a resource guide that provides at least one approachable path for you to get started, have fun, and develop the confidence to push yourself and your drones further. We’ll be adding to this guide on a regular basis, so please let us know what additional topics you’d like to see included!