Note: You can see the full collection of photos here.
A few years ago, we added a drone (a DJI Mavic Pro 2) to our photography kit and I have come to have a love/hate relationship with it. To begin with the love, it is an incredible piece of technology - a flying camera that can take sharp photos with exposure times of more than a second in calm conditions. This is worth saying again so we can spend a few seconds marveling together: a flying camera that is affordable enough to add to a nature photography kit! Wow! And it is about the size of a Nalgene water bottle when folded up. Wow again!
One of the things I enjoy most about aerial photography with a drone is how the resulting photos tell a totally different story than the one you experience when walking across the same landscape (if you can, in fact, walk across it). For example, in the photos below, you will see many tiny channels. These channels feel individually consequential when you walk up one of them but then become an extensive sea of branching watercourses when seen from the air. One individual channel becomes only a tiny part of a massive network from this alternative perspective. Every time we use a drone for aerial photography in addition to our typical land-based photography, I walk away with a much greater appreciation for the area and have more context for how different parts of a landscape fit and flow together.
The drawbacks of drones are frequently debated among landscape photographers and you have likely heard all of these arguments against their use. Drones are noisy and using one can negatively impact the experience others are having out in nature. Some people use them to intentionally harass wildlife and their presence can unintentionally cause stress and behavior changes for those same creatures. Irresponsible users continually cause problems for land managers, with issues ranging from constantly policing illegal use in national parks to interfering with high-risk, high-stakes operations like wildland firefighting. However, if you are willing to accept some limitations and put respect for other people, wildlife, rules, and regulations over your photography desires (#NatureFirst), there are still a lot of landscapes where drone photography can be done responsibly (in addition to following all the rules related to using drones on public lands, we, for example, choose not to fly our drone when any other people are around).
Beyond these limitations, the part of drone photography that I continually struggle with is how it makes me feel at the end of a photography session - in awe of the landscape but totally drained. With limited battery life and short flying times, drone photography is stressful. Every time I put our drone up in the sky, the opportunities I see on the screen seem limitless but the time to work with those opportunities feels extraordinarily limited. And that screen… Drone photography is a lot like playing a video game since you are physically disconnected from the landscape you are photographing. And, unless you have impeccable timing, the drone tells you it is time to return right as the light is looking perfect. While seeing different perspectives through the drone is an incredible experience, it is also a distant one. We spent about a week and a half focused on aerial photography at one of the locations featured in the photos below. During that time, I had trouble sleeping and my body felt constantly tense, two physical conditions that directly connected to the experience of feeling rushed and detached during every outing with the drone.
From the air, the human impact on nature also takes on a more visceral quality that can feel downright distressing. Passing one set of tire tracks as you walk through a landscape is easy to compartmentalize as representing the actions of a single person. Seeing an entire network of destruction from the air feels like a gut-punch - a collective representation of our society’s disrespect for wild places and our inability to see the inherent value of a desolate landscape beyond our desire to use or monetize it. In one case, we watched this transformation over the course of a few days. For years prior, an expansive area of mostly untouched badlands - my favorite landscape of those I have photographed from above - was fully closed to all off-road travel. With no public input, the Bureau of Land Management suddenly opened up the area to unfettered off-road travel and within hours, we watched as a network of tire tracks started forming across this previously pristine expanse of hills bisected with washes full of seasonal wildflowers (the “before” version of this landscape is shown in the first three photographs below).
I often talk about how my photography style can be summed up in these simple words: slow down, wander around, and be curious. Adding a drone to our photography kit helped add a new dimension to the idea of “wandering around” and that new dimension absolutely brings a richness to experiencing and understanding a landscape. Conversely, aerial photography with a drone is the opposite of slowing down; the pace and intensity of working with a drone makes me feel physically anxious and stressed, which is the opposite feeling of what I am seeking when going out into nature. After thinking more deeply about why this miraculous tool causes so much angst for me, I am trying to learn to work with our drone differently and see it as more of a tool for visual exploration rather than putting so much pressure on myself to come back with a card full of “keepers.” (If any drone photographers reading this post have any advice in this regard, please share it as I would love to learn from your experience.)
So, with these mixed feelings in mind, I am sharing a collection of aerial photographs taken in three separate locations across the Colorado Plateau, all with a focus on expanses of badlands and photographed with abstraction in mind. This is a gallery inspired by David Thompson, Alex Noriega, and others who were among the first people to photograph these landscapes using a drone. So, while I tried to photograph these places with an eye toward my own personal interpretations, you will see their influence in some of the photographs.
A small sampling is below or you can see the full collection of photos here.
