Brrrr! Photographing winter (1)
Drone Photography in winter is an enormous challenge.
It’s too cold for comfort. The drone’s batteries deplete too quickly. Without sun, everything looks dull. Those spectacular autumn leaves have long fallen from the trees.
No wonder we launch our drones less often once it gets cold. No wonder we spend more time at the computer, editing our fair weather photos.
Yet winter offers special aerial opportunities for an artist, even if part of me just wants to curl up in a warm place.
First, a few cautions
In wintertime, I have to take special care:
Dress more warmly than I think I need to
Wear gloves that can activate my touch screen
Keep batteries warm and strong by storing them next to my body
Plan short flights, and change batteries frequently
Use a takeoff pad to avoid stirring up snow from the ground
Tread extra carefully, so I don’t take my equipment for a fall
I also avoid heavy winds. As the drone’s battery gets cool, it has less reserve power to fight its way back to base. And I certainly don’t want to venture out on questionable ice to retrieve a drone that’s been forced to land. (Although I did once put myself through that particular misery.)
And I don’t launch in heavy snowfall. Melting snow can interfere with the motors. On the other hand, scattered light snowflakes are unlikely to cause problems.
Winter simplifies
With those cautions in mind, let’s look at some of the delights that await in winter low altitude photography. When the trees are bare and snow blankets the ground, the shapes we photograph are simplified, stripped of distractions. That gives them the power to stimulate our awareness of composition.
This image of a dock at Mimico Cruising Club features strong shapes and plenty of contrasts: The geometric dock vs the organic ice. Diagonal cropping vs the right angles of the structure. Precise shadows vs soft snow. Thick ice vs recent freezeup. Dark water vs shiny ice.
In art photography it’s always true that the more you look, the more you see.
The unexpected
Low altitude aerial photography can offer wonderful winter surprises, like these ice spiders.
I visited Scarborough Bluffs one sunny day to photograph the hoodoos – I’ll show you a photograph next time. But what I discovered from the air was quite unexpected.
Dozens of black spiders were crawling across the frozen surface of a pond, toward the shadow of a tree.
The irony is that this intriguing pattern was invisible from where I stood. I would have left without seeing it except that, despite chattering teeth, I remembered my prime rule for droning: Go high, go soon.
From 400 feet, we may see shapes and patterns unimaginable from ground level. Like ice spiders.
OK, maybe these weren’t spiders. My best guess is that warm water from the bottom of the pond was erupting to the surface, melting patches of ice, then forcing cracks out from the center.
Whatever the explanation, they helped form one of my favorite images.
The delight of color
By its very nature, winter often strips images of their color, emphasizing composition much as black and white photography does.
And sometimes the result is splashes of color that shine out like jewels, delighting the eye. Like the cottage in the photo at top.
In this shot of a farm pond at dusk, the green “eyebrows” at the top of the frame remind us of the life hibernating beneath the snow. Their vibrancy encourages us to inspect the image more closely.
That’s when we may notice, for instance, that the ice has a reflective quality. Looking deeper, we see cracks emanating from the base of the tree, forming what appears to be a skeletal image of the tree itself.
Next time…
…we’ll check out how winter’s unique qualities reduce distractions, revealing the abstract patterns of our mother Earth.