It gives a new perspective but it doesn't allow for very visually interesting photos. The shots are (by nature of drone photography) almost always composed exactly the same. The different landscapes in the article are beautiful, but there are basically two compositions in the article: the majority have a vertical composition looking straight down with a path or river going from top to bottom (sometimes it goes from left to right). There are a couple of shots that show a landscape from a non-vertical angle.
>You can argue drone photography, is the most important camera innovation of the past 100 years.
Really? I mean you could, but it seems silly. I'd say digital image sensors are by far a much more important innovation. Without those, you don't have drone photography, or you do, but it's so prohibitively expensive that it's not available to anyone who can do interesting things with it. Without digital image sensors you don't have camera phones, you don't have GoPros, you don't have dashcams, you don't have bodycams, you don't have drone cameras, you don't have cameras mounted on the sides of rockets, etc. You don't have the DSLR revolution that got high quality cameras in the hands of amateurs last decade.
I'd say digital image sensors are by far a much more important innovation
I thought about this statement before writing it, and I know what you mean. But the way I justify this view is that with film vs digital I was never able to take any different images. Sure, digital photography is at the heart of drones. But A digital camera didn't give me an entirely a new way to easily tell a story.
Of course, I could rent a helicopter (almost impossible for some locations and prohibitively expensive) but to carry a small gadget and send it up to tell a story is something that has only become possible recently.
Take something like this [0]. It's a former spy radio satellite the operated in current Latvia during the USSR days and now has been turned into a radio telescope. It would be impossible to tell a story about it's location in middle of trees, etc. unless I had a helicopter.
Or how do you show there is a monument built on top of the hills in Buda side that overlooks the river on Budapest. You can not [1].
As I said, it gives you abilities to tell stories that you could not do with an analogue camera.
>You can argue drone photography, is the most important camera innovation of the past 100 years.
Really? I mean you could, but it seems silly. I'd say digital image sensors are by far a much more important innovation. Without those, you don't have drone photography, or you do, but it's so prohibitively expensive that it's not available to anyone who can do interesting things with it. Without digital image sensors you don't have camera phones, you don't have GoPros, you don't have dashcams, you don't have bodycams, you don't have drone cameras, you don't have cameras mounted on the sides of rockets, etc. You don't have the DSLR revolution that got high quality cameras in the hands of amateurs last decade.