How Drones UNLOCK Amazing New City Perspectives From Above

Using your drone and your feet to rediscover your city.

I am a walker. I absolutely, definitively prefer exploring on foot rather than by car or public transport. But in recent years, I’ve discovered that combining walking with drone photography has completely transformed how I see my city. Now, my drone is always tucked into my jacket pocket when I explore the colonial center of Quito.

While walking offers one perspective, drones provide another complementary view

To actually rediscover your city you not only have to walk to new places, you should change your point of view. And here comes the magic. When I say point of view, I didn’t only mean a physical point of view. I mean a sentimental, social and specially new point of view.

Adopting an Explorer’s Mindset

You have to start opening your mind to really start seeing new things with your eyes. Remember that the only thing you can change about other persons is the way you look at them. Well, this is our view now. If we choose the adventurer’s spirit and put that hat over our heads, we can and will start to rediscover our own city, again.

Yes, this is a drone website. And of course we are talking about drones here in this article. But, who controls the drone? Who’s that gorgeous human that just took off the drone and doesn’t want to repeat the same old shoots in the same old places? Now that we’ve established the right mindset, let’s talk about the practical aspects…

Don’t Need To Travel (For Now)

Yes, I know that one of the most important things for getting good, but GREAT shots is to invest in traveling to new and exciting places. Also applies to ground videography and photography. But what about if we not only change our techniques, but our mind and what we expect about flying in our city?

Once we take that first step, about how open we are to receive new, better, different shots of our city, we have the right mindset so we can take off and start getting “brand new” material of our common places.

Pre-Flight Preparation For Urban Exploration

Once your mind is ready, get your bird ready: do you have enough batteries? Did you check if you can fly over the zone you are about to walk? Are there any kind of flying restrictions? (Here in Quito, just in colonial downtown is located the presidential palace so it’s not easy to fly there, but also not impossible to ask for permission), so if there’s not much else to pack, grab your stuff and go to the place.

The Variables

What can we do differently to rediscover our city? Well I’m not captain Obvious to tell you to fly 400′ AGL and point the gimbal straight down. I love nadir shots, TRUST me, but I bet that as EVERY DRONE OPERATOR out there, you just burned that shot on your first one hundred flights.

But something that I actually loved to do is to create backlighting shots.

To do this, you need to fly in the morning or the afternoon, so the sun is not very high over the horizon but close to it. Then you can choose a high building and fly around it while it covers the sun that should be in front of the camera of your drone, so when the drone finishes the movement the light goes towards the drone and gives you a huge front flare. That is something you can see in this two examples:

When you practice long enough (and if you choose to colorize the shots instead of using them straight from the drone) you can get a really nice opening shot for any video in your city.

New Tricks Up Your Sleeve

As I said before, there’s a lot of tricks up the drone operator’s sleeve. If you just want to start doing (and seeing) things differently you have to act differently.

At which time do you usually fly? Have you ever flown at 5 am? 6 am?

Search for the golden (shortly after sunrise or before sunset) and the blue (just before sunrise or after sunset) hour. Search for interesting shadows cast by buildings. Look for contrasts between old and new architecture. Do Timelapses. You know that there is a limit on how high you can fly a drone, but there’s no limit on how close to the ground you can do it. Maybe that will sound obvious but as I always tell my students “Everyone can fly high but not everyone has the skills to fly low and slow”

And that’s something you should try too. I’m not telling you to go straight to trees and electric poles, but try to fly at a dog eye’s level. And if you go to a big open field, and fly low, the perspective and the feeling of speed is just amazing.

Remember, we just not watch with our eyes, but with our minds. Walk around and find out what your city has for you and show it with your drone!