Photography with drones in an immersive view

- Hi, this week on The Practicing Photographer, I'll be feeling ridiculous. I think I'm going to, and it's, honestly it's only going to get worse. I though maybe having these cool high-tech goggles on would actually make me look, I don't know, cooler somehow, and it's, I just don't think that's going to happen. But I'm wearing them anyway because they do do something really fantastic if you are interested in still photography from a drone. I have a drone right over here. This is the Phantom 4, which is equipped with an excellent wide-angle camera that is actually able to shoot RAW. I really like shooting with this thing.

Of course it can also do video and a lot of people do a lot of great video work with drones. I'm more of a still shooter so I tend to use it more for stills. I find drone photography a lot to be like macro photography. You can see something that you think is potentially good subject matter but it's just really difficult to pre-visualize what you might get. One of the great things about this system is it uses your smartphone as a viewfinder. So right out of the box, you've got a full first-person view capability with this drone so it's really easy to see what you're shooting, frame up shots, and so on and so forth.

With a third-party piece of software though, you can go an extra step and get really immersive by adding a pair of really dorky-looking but not-that-expensive goggles. That's what these are. These are about $50 bucks off of Amazon. As you may have guessed, my phone is in here right now. This is just like a Google Cardboard or any other smartphone-based VR headset. So my phone is sitting in here and it's running a piece of software called Litchi. This is a piece of software designed for the iPhone to work specifically with certain drones including the Phantom 4.

Does a lot of things and over a couple different installments of The Practicing Photographer, we're going to look at what it can do. Today, we're particularly interested in the VR view that works with the headset and more specifically, with it's ability to do head-tracking for controlling the gimbal. So I'm going to put the drone up in the air and then I'm going to put the goggles on and I've got it set up right now so what I'm seeing in the goggles is actually a fully immersive view, but I've got it set for gimbal-tracking which means as I move my head around, the gimbal will go up and down.

What's great about this, is it means that I can fly with my hands and just look around and steer, it can't entirely steer the drone in this mode but I can at least move the gimbal up and down. So let's put the drone up in the air here. This doesn't change anything about the way that I fly. I'm starting by flying up. That's probably enough and now I'm deploying the goggles so very exciting. Oh my! And so here I am up in the air and as I'm moving my head up and down, the gimbal is moving up and down and what I find is, this allows me to think one less thing about flying the drone.

I'm not having to steer the gimbal, which is something that I would normally do with my hands. Instead, I can just fly the drone around and look around. And as I'm looking around, I can see if there are any shots that I want. And there's just something about taking one less part of the process out of my hands and out of some kind of technical or theoretical realm and just putting it into my body, something about doing that lets me think a little bit more about the shooting.

Now, we're rolling video on the drone right now so I can't actually take any stills while we're doing this, so I'm just having a nice look around. Now, what's cool is I can also switch this into another mode and that is to make it so I steer the drone with my head so in that mode, as I turn my head, the drone actually steers and again, that's just another thing that I can take out of the realm of my hands and out of the realm of this controller and just put into my body and I find that the ability to do that is allowing me to think more, or feel more about the shooting.

It's one less distraction, it's more about just image. And that's, I'm finding it's a much nicer way to shoot. So if you've got a compatible drone, you're going to want to check out Litchi and if you are interested in it, you're going to want to get a pair of goggles that works with it. It's a, it's a really nice immersive way to take still photographs from the air.