Go high, go soon

Maybe you already know what you want to photograph. You take off, ascend to 20 feet, and take your pictures. But never, I mean never, stop there.

Lift your drone as high as you can, as soon as you can, because from 400 feet you may discover a scene you could never anticipate. Otherwise, you’ll never know what you failed to see.

Maybe it’s the glorious sweep of a boat cutting the water and the islands marching out to infinity. You wouldn’t want to miss a shot like this, just because you were fixated on a cute cottage.

Beautiful and horrible

Recently I travelled to the edge of the Humber river to capture images of the marshes on the shore. The Humber is a wonderful big river that was once the highway for the native peoples. Anyway, I photographed what I was hoping for, and then remembered my own advice. Go high, go soon.

So I took the drone up to the legal 400 feet, set the camera to horizontal, and began a slow rotation along the horizon from east to north to west to south. I snapped a couple of images, but nothing much caught my imagination.

Then I tilted the camera down a little and rotated again. East, north, west, south. Hey, what are those enormous circles? I didn’t know they were nearby.

Curious, I sent the drone south till it was almost directly over the circles, and took a number of shots.

Those huge clock-like objects turned out to be settling tanks. They take sewage from the city’s sinks and toilets, treat it as best they can, then release the water into this beautiful river. From there it’s only a few minutes till the effluent is discharged into Lake Ontario.

The ascent of my drone had revealed something real, terrible, and in a surprising way, artistic. The rhythmic image of six tanks, like clocks with their hands pointing to differing times, remind us it’s late in the quest to save our dear planet from environmental harm.

Tornado debris

A couple of years ago, a series of devastating tornadoes struck the city. Live power lines fell to the ground, houses lost their roofs, cars were destroyed, people displaced. I heard rumors that one of the tornadoes had touched down somewhere in the uninhabited woods many miles away.

But I wasn’t thinking about storms when I drove into the forest with my drone to photograph the late autumn colors. My first act was to send the drone up to maximum altitude. At 400 feet, I began its slow rotation, and suddenly caught my breath. For there, way out in the wild woods, inaccessible except from the air, was the unexpected but unmistakable evidence of that tornado.

I took several shots. In the late afternoon sun, the destroyed trees were in shadow. So although the enormity of the devastation was clear, the details were less obvious.

When I got the images home for editing, I selected the shady area and boosted the exposure. The photograph that resulted is certainly instructive.

As I examined it closely, I could see that the trees had been felled in a circular pattern corresponding to the rotation of the cyclone. I was struck by the power of our natural environment, and how it kicks back when we put it under stress.

And once again I was reminded of the first law of drones: go high, go soon.