Alternative Cityscape Visualisation: Drone shooting as a new dimension in urban photography

I was educated as a city planner and an architect. I am not practising any of these professions anymore due to the fact that they do not offer enough freedom during the process of creation. I later turned into an artist using mainly photography as a visual expression tool and a professional photographer shooting architecture and cityscapes. I always had a deep interest in urban photography, un/consciously referring to my educational past. I kept panoramic photography always in my orbit of most used visualisation apparatuses and techniques, in order to be able to construct more comprehensive urban depictions. Roofs, terraces of skyscrapers, observations decks, towers of any kind have usually been my typical platforms, where I have created a remarkably large collection of global cityscapes. It was and still is too expensive to hire a helicopter for a shoot that does not guarantee a commercial return. While I will keep using the above techniques, I feel like I entered a new era in my professional photography practice as I recently acquired a drone. Drones are not that easy to operate and that affordable to buy, if you intend to go highly professional with hi-res camera bodies on-board. You have to have an operator flying an octocopter and yourself in command of the operator telling him/her where to go and what angle to give, in order to end up with the “right” photograph. I preferred a low-priced quadcopter with a rather lower resolution camera, since I can control both the flying gismo and the camera myself. I can now send my eye to the sky, to a sky tier that I personally call “dronosphere”, a layer that is roughly in between 50 – 150 metres. This height gives me a particular viewpoint in between street view and map view. This paper will discuss if drone photography can bring a novel visual language to cityscape and / or street photography.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Murat Germen

Conference

Publication date: July 2016

Publication date (Print): July 2016

Pages: 150-157

Affiliations

[1 ] Sabanci University

FASS, 34056, Istanbul, Turkey

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2016.31

SO-VID: 448ff8b6-9767-4dda-aa76-579cf78d3bb7

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

Conference acronym: EVA

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 12 - 14 July 2016

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2016.31

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] J. W. Bagley 1941 Aerophotography and Aerosurveying. McGraw-Hill New York

[2] D. Bate 2009 Photography: The Key Concepts. Berg New York

[3] R. Bjornstad 2014 Art of the Map The Register-Guard Newspaper (Eugene, OR) April 6

[4] M. J. BlitzJ. GrimsleyS. E. HendersonJ. Thai 2015 Regulating Drones under the First and Fourth Amendments William and Mary Law Review 57 1

[5] S. Cascone 2014 Latest Art Trend is Drone Photography ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/latest-art-trend-is-drone-photography-75709">https://news.artnet.com/art-world/latest-art-trend-is-drone-photography-75709 20 March 2016

[6] A. Choi-Fitzpatrick 2014 Drones for Good: Technological Innovations, Social Movements, and the State Journal of International Affairs 68 1 Fall-Winter

[7] A. Derewecki 2015 Are Drones Better than Telephoto Lenses for Spying? The Answer May Creep You Out ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://petapixel.com/2015/08/21/are-drones-better-than-zoom-lenses-for-spying-the-answer-may-creep-you-out/">http://petapixel.com/2015/08/21/are-drones-better-than-zoom-lenses-for-spying-the-answer-may-creep-you-out/ 20 March 2016

[8] A. Hossaini 2006 Aerial Photography Warren Lynne Encyclopedia of Twentieth-century Photography Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group New York

[9] J. Koebler 2014 This Drone-Shot Porn is Beautiful ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-first-drone-shot-porn-is-beautiful-nsfw">http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-first-drone-shot-porn-is-beautiful-nsfw 20 March 2016

[10] W. T. Lee 1922 The Face of the Earth as Seen from the Air: A Study in the Application of Airplane Photography to Geography. American Geographical Society New York, USA

[11] A. H. Michel 2014 The Drone that will Change Graffiti: An Interview with KATSU ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-graffiti-drone-an-interview-with-katsu">http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-graffiti-drone-an-interview-with-katsu 20 March 2016

[12] A. Nunes 2014 Now even Drones are Taking Selfies ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://thecreatorsproiect.vice.com/blog/now-even-drones-are-taking-selfies">http://thecreatorsproiect.vice.com/blog/now-even-drones-are-taking-selfies 20 March 2016

[13] A. Ohlin 2002 Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime Art Journal 61 4 22 35

[14] J. Pfeil 2011 Throwable panoramic ball camera ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://ionaspfeil.de/ballcamera">http://ionaspfeil.de/ballcamera 20 March 2016

[15] J. Raban 1974 Soft City. Collins Harvill London

[16] A. Soltani 2013 Embodied Airborne Imagery: Low-Altitude Cinematic Urban Topography Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2011), London 6-8 July 39 55 Springer, London-Heidelberg-New York-Dordrecht

[17] C. E. Wright, 2015 A Fair Flight: Drone Photography and the Law ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.lynda.com/articles/drone-photography-laws">http://www.lynda.com/articles/drone-photography-laws 20 March 2016

[18] M. Zhang 2015a Arkansas Bill Criminalizes Capturing and Possessing Certain Camera Drone Photos ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://petapixel.com/2015/01/16/arkansas-bill-criminalizes-capturing-possessing-certain-camera-drone-photos/">http://petapixel.com/2015/01/16/arkansas-bill-criminalizes-capturing-possessing-certain-camera-drone-photos/ 20 March 2016

[19] M. Zhang 2015b California Governor Vetoes Bill that Banned Drones over Private Property ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://petapixel.com/2015/09/11/california-governor-vetoes-bill-that-banned-drones-over-private-property/">http://petapixel.com/2015/09/11/california-governor-vetoes-bill-that-banned-drones-over-private-property/ 20 March 2016

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