Up in the Air

Since buying my first drone 3 years ago now, you could say things have literally taken-off. The technology has also come a long way in that very short time. As an early adopter of this new wave of technology it is always difficult to know when to jump in and what to buy when you do. A good friend of mine gave me some advise and said to go for the “MVP”. Minimum viable product. What he was really saying is don’t push the boat out and buy the biggest baddest Octo-copter in case things don’t work out. That was good advise and I’ve stuck to it ever since.

With our drone photography and video we have upgraded over the three years and worked with a couple of different systems. Currently we are using a phantom 2 with a 3 axis gimbal and a 4k GoPro camera. That works fine for what we are doing and is what I currently consider to be my MVP. We are about to upgrade again to a Phantom 4. The video and stills quality will be comparable with what we have now, maybe even a little better, We can still shoot at 4K. The main reason for upgrading again is mainly the built in safety factors. The new drone has more safety built in as well as more flying features.

Winter Park Photography are first and foremost photographers. We pride ourselves in delivering good quality, consistent images. There are companies out there that know an awful lot about drones and things that fly and these guys are doing drone photography, but when a job requires more than aerial stills or video that makes you go “Wow!”, where do you go?
There are some jobs that only require aerial stills or video, maybe construction site photography, road planning or even commercial real estate land deals that want aerial photography of a specific lot of land to show off to investors.

But when it comes to other commercial ventures and corporate videos, we use our drone photography and video as an add-on to our main product. It boosts the whole project, but is not the whole story. I have had a couple of clients recently that call up asking for the drone and when we get into it, they really want a corporate video to tell a story and they are attracted to the drone shots.They end up having video from the ground as well as drone shots and they need an edited video to delivery to clients. We can do it all.

Recently the FAA have tightened up on their rules for operating drones commercially. For that reason our drones are already registered with the FAA and we have them labelled with their N numbers. We have also brought in a licensed pilot flying under an FAA 333 exemption to enable us to continue to fly commercially. I’m a little miffed because I love to fly the drone myself, but to stay above board I have my pilot flying the drone while I direct the shots.

In light of the recent popularity of drones and aerial photography and video, I was interviewed by the Orlando Business Journal for an article about how drones have changed 3 local businesses. Winter Park Photography being one of those businesses. You can see the article here.