Drone News

Here’s something fun to carry you into the weekend. Freefly, which makes the Alta 8 camera drone, released a video today showing someone surfing while being pulled by a high-flying drone. It was shot at Dash Point State Park in Washington.

The Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) member magazines recently convened for their General Assembly to vote for the best photo and imaging products launched by the industry in the last 12 months. The voting took place during the General Assembly that was held in spring 2016 in San Francisco, California.

This amazing aerial footage shows a lone seal swimming through a huge school of fish off Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia—a popular spot for surfers. The fish create some mesmerizing shapes as the seal passes through their midst, while the surfers observe the action.

Reuben Wu is an artist with the fascinating vision of creating otherworldly landscape photographs that evoke both science fiction and 19th century Romantic paintings. He does this by selectively light-painting his scenes with a powerful done-mounted light.

The responsible use of recreational drones is becoming a heightened concern as these devices are gaining in popularity among photographers and other hobbyists. Last Friday afternoon things nearly got ugly as the pilot of a Lufthansa passenger jumbo jet reported nearly colliding with a drone while on landing approach to Los Angeles International Airport.

During the coming year, the means we’ll use to capture photographs may change but not the motivation to share our view of the world with others. To accomplish this goal we need tools to change the way we see that world and interact with it. Imagine handing an iPhone to Alexander Graham Bell. What would he think of it? The future of imaging includes many paradigm-shifting technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence but in the short run, we’ll deal with trends.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officially refers to quadcopters as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) but they obviously have more in common with the kind of hobbyist’s radio-controlled aircraft that have been around since I was a member of the Poly Aeroneers in high school. Yet tech blogs and social media endlessly refer to quadcopters as “drones” when the only thing a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and a DJI Phantom 1 have in common is that they’re capable of flight. But they’re not without some controversy.