Exploring the Litchi software app for drone photography

- This is a great time to be a photographer for any number of reasons. The reason I'm thinking of right now is the drone. A lot of people think of drones as for video or for warfare, I'm thinking of them a lot more, lately, for still photography. I've been doing a lot of still shooting with my drone, and I'm really enjoying it. I'm shooting with a DJI Phantom 4, and DJI has done something very smart. In addition to putting an exceptional gimbal on their camera and a very high-quality little GoPro-style action cam, they have released an API for their platform, for their software platform.

That allows third-party developers to create software for running the Phantom. This has allowed the creation of a program called Litchi, this is a 25 dollar app that runs on your iPhone or Android phone that lets you do some things that you can't do with the stock DJI app that comes with the Phantom 4. Litchi is compatible with a couple of other DJI drones, check their website to see if it works with yours. Straight out of the box, your Phantom comes with software that lets you do some pretty amazing things. It will automatically orbit a subject, it will track a subject, it will track the controller.

Litchi takes all that and builds on it. For video photographers, what's really great about Litchi is its ability to allow you to pre-program a path and execute that path over and over and over. That lets you do multiple takes, that lets the drone fly unattended, that frees you up to do other things. This is this practicing photographer, we're not going to talk so much about the video abilities made possible by Litchi. What I love it for, as a still photographer, is the ability to build a mission. So with Litchi, I can, just by looking at a map, spec out a route that I want the drone to fly.

I can tell it which direction to be pointed along the way, and I can tell it what to take pictures of as it goes. So, that doesn't buy me much that I can't get just by flying in real time, but what's cool about Litchi is that mission gets downloaded to the drone, and it flies it autonomously. What's so valuable about that, is that it lets me get the drone into places that I normally can't get to, either because they're too far away, or because there's something in the way that's interfering with my controller. In other words, I can fly it out of range of the controller or around a mountain or something between me and the drone, someplace where I lose contact with it, can't see what it's doing, and it will still go ahead and fly its merry way, and take the shots I asked it to take, and then come home and give me back the pictures.

This has opened up a lot of possibilities for me, because at least for landscape and wilderness shooting, a lot of times the thing you want to get, the vantage point you want to get, you can't get to, either because it's too far away or there's something in the way. Litchi is very easy to use, in that regard, it's just a click and drag interface. There are some things you need to think about before you start doing this kind of mission planning. The software does not allow you to tell the drone, stay 30 feet off the ground, and fly this terrain. You have to build elevations into your points by command, you have to map that in, and that means you have to know what those elevations are.

And it's not elevation above sea level, it's elevation above where you took off from, so a lot of times you have to do some recon of your elevations, and really plan your route out very carefully. It takes some practice to learn how to use their interface, and again, it takes a lot of planning, forethought to build a route that's legitimate. It also takes a lot of nerve to finally hit that Go button and to let it go off. I did some test flights before I did anything too complicated, and I got to tell you, those two or three minutes where maybe it goes out of range and you don't hear from it are a really long two or three minutes.

But, what this lets you do, is get a camera into a place you normally couldn't get it into, and come back with pictures. Obviously, you're limited by battery time, you don't want to build a route that goes beyond what the drone's going to be able to come back from. Litchi has some really nice things built in to help you manage that situation. So, if you have a drone, I really recommend checking this out for still shooting. Obviously, for video it's great also, it lets you do things like a more sophisticated motion-tracking than what the DJI app does, all of that's great, but for still photographers, I think there's a lot of possibility here.

25 bucks is a little expensive, but for what it lets you do, it's really worth it.