as i've noted in a few threads here and there, lately i've been pursuing aerial photography using my d810 from a remote controlled hexacopter (aka "drone," although it's no more a drone than a remote control toy car is...)
i've found it a very entertaining offshoot of architectural/cityscape and landscape photography, although i have not yet created the opportunity for real landscape work. soon, perhaps a trip to a nearby quiet and snowy place.
the challenges are obvious - the platform is inherently mobile, so short shutter speeds are the order of the day. any significant wind essentially scrubs the shot for safety reasons. an appropriate launch site is required, which means few or no people and no legal restrictions (the latter eliminates all national parks in the united states, as well as areas within a few miles of airports for obvious reasons.) finally, camera controls can not really be adjusted in flight. there are setups which allow this, but nothing with the kind of flexibility of lenses and imaging performance as a full frame (or even DX) dslr.
more challenging, i'd say, is the compositional challenge. to a degree, aerial photographs from reasonably low altitudes (the legal limit is 400 feet here) don't look much different than photographs from scenic lookouts or tall buildings. my setup does not allow changing the orientation of the camera in flight (working on that!) so i haven't been doing any "views straight down" of the type seen in maps today.
so, for critique and comment, here's about a years worth of this subject. most are taken very close to home, for obvious reasons. virtually all are with the d810 and 20mm f/1.8, shot at f/1.8-4.0, ISOs ranging from 400 to 3200, processed from raw files in ACR. most of them are fairly sharp at the "pixel" level.
1 i started at fairly low elevation, and over a street, for a perspective not normally seen except where major streets dead end.
2 continuing the theme of "unusual vantage points," i shot this cathedral near home.
3 and then the bay bridge
4-7 after a bunch of which i started taking off from our roof. a less traditionally "scenic" vista, but good opportunity for exploring the flight envelope and finding different qualities of light. these are all from essentially the same location in plan, different heights, angles, times of day, cropping, etc.
4
5
6
7
8 this one dissapointed in that it looks like it could just be from someone's window, having been taking from the top of a hill. there are no windows at this elevation, but that's not obvious and the scene is otherwise unspectacular.
9 a bit of the same problem here, although the foreground framing is perhaps more interesting.
