Three Essential Drone Photography Compositions

What's up guys? photographer David Johnson here. And today I'm coming to you from Haiti. And a lot of times in countries like this or when you're traveling around or shooting outside and some of these locations what you find in front of you is walls. Now, how do you get above those walls? Well, that's when you have to get the drone out and really take your photography to the next level, which is the sky. And how do you do that? Exactly well, aerial photography and drone photography is really no different than normal photography composition, but you are working with several new composition factors that we need to get into, so how do you take the best drone photography possible with these different compositions? So the first type of composition and probably the most popular type of composition is basically just your standard composition that you would get if you were standing up somewhere. Now, the difference here is when you have your drone up in the air, than when you're standing on the ground is you're just slightly more elevated. So a lot of times those compositions you're not getting the good foreground element. You're getting really close to an element with the drone. Now, how do you kind of compensate for that? Will you tilt your angle of your lens down a little bit try to incorporate some foregrounds in there to compensate the next type of composition that we need to look at is the 45 degree angle composition from the sky. Now these are those compositions that when you get up in the air, then what do you do? If you're looking straight out you might not have the horizon line or elements in front of you the way you want them. So what you do is point your camera on your drone down at about 45 degrees. Most drones will allow this to happen. All the DGI models have this available. I'm using the DJI Mavic Pro that allows me to do this with my controller. So try to get up in the air and then pointed down at 45 degrees to really see from a 45 degree angle what you can fit into your lens and into the frame. Because a lot of times that's going to be a more dynamic image especially when you get later on in the day and you're shooting during golden hour you get longer shadows stretched out or you get some lays lingering around in the valleys. The last composition that you can really focus on with drone photography when you're shooting outdoor photography is my personal favorite. The bird's eye view composition. And that's when you tilt your camera on your drone to look straight down at the landscape. Now this is a really effective way of shooting natural designs in a landscape in a way that most people haven't even seen before. These are those type of aerial images that you can only see if you're up in an airplane, looking straight down at the ground, the magic with drones is you can easily create those from your own backyard and give people a different viewpoint of what they normally see. So when you're shooting a bird's eye view, really try to look straight down on whatever you're shooting and find geometric patterns like shapes, circles, squares lines, all these things go together to make a really solid bird's eye view Image.