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As I have already writ­ten in my arti­cle “Pho­tog­ra­phy in 3 dimen­sions”, I have now “got up into the air” and bought a drone. Although hav­ing record­ed some videos with it, I am pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in the still image, the pho­tog­ra­phy, as in most of the arti­cles on this web­site. Although there are already count­less reports and YouTube videos on drones on the Inter­net, these are most­ly about cre­at­ing videos, pho­tog­ra­phy is often left behind for my taste.

After a good 15 hours of fly­ing with my drones and a good 130km flown, I have now gained some first expe­ri­ences, about which I would like to report here.

Which drone for photographers?

In pho­tog­ra­phy, my demands have grown more and more over the years. I think many peo­ple feel the same way. As already dis­cussed here on my web­site sev­er­al times, I actu­al­ly use a Canon EOS R5 with a huge full-frame sen­sor and a res­o­lu­tion of 45 megapix­els as my main cam­era. With it I use lens­es from 14 to 600mm focal length. In the mean­time, I have become accus­tomed to the qual­i­ty of results pos­si­ble with this cam­era and the exten­sive pro­cess­ing possibilities.

Would I use this as a stan­dard also in drone pho­tog­ra­phy, it would be only pos­si­ble to pho­to­graph with a very large and expen­sive drone, which would also be dif­fi­cult to trans­port and oper­ate - not to men­tion the legal aspects (insur­ance cov­er­age, drone license). I did­n’t want that, so a com­pro­mise was necessary.

On a mood at the begin­ning of this year, I took advan­tage of a low-priced offer on ama­zon and bought a DJI Mini 2 in the “fly more com­bo” com­plete set to gain my first expe­ri­ence with drones. My expec­ta­tions were ini­tial­ly quite low, I ini­tial­ly saw the whole thing as a gimmick.

How­ev­er, the “Fly more” pack­age, which was deliv­ered the very next day, made a big impres­sion on me. The DJI Mini 2 is sur­pris­ing­ly small and light (<249g). When fold­ed, it fits eas­i­ly in the palm of my hand. The fold­ing mech­a­nism for the rotor arms is inge­nious­ly thought out and makes an amaz­ing­ly sta­ble impres­sion. Every­thing fits func­tion­al­ly into a small shoul­der bag that is includ­ed. The three bat­ter­ies can be charged togeth­er in the includ­ed car­ry­ing case or direct­ly in the drone via USB-C. The oper­a­tion of the con­troller and the DJI-Fly app are intu­itive to mas­ter with­out much study of the man­u­al. Every­thing is very well thought out, and DJI’s many years of expe­ri­ence in drone con­struc­tion are evi­dent everywhere.

Although the pho­to results were sur­pris­ing­ly good for the size of the DJI Mini 2, they still did not meet my require­ments in pho­tog­ra­phy. For film­ing (at least up to a res­o­lu­tion of 4K/30p), how­ev­er, it is real­ly good - at least for my (so far) mod­est demands.

So I con­tin­ued to wait for the so-called “sweet spot” in drone devel­op­ment - the ide­al com­pro­mise for me between image qual­i­ty, porta­bil­i­ty and affordability.

“Sweet spots” in tech­ni­cal devel­op­ments are rare, but they have the poten­tial to cre­ate major trans­for­ma­tions. I’m think­ing, for exam­ple, of the trans­for­ma­tion from vinyl records to CDs, from tube tele­vi­sions to flat screens, and many oth­ers. A new tech­nol­o­gy often only comes into play when it falls below a cer­tain cost threshold.

In 2003, for exam­ple, I believe this was achieved in dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy with the release of the Canon EOS Dig­i­tal Rebel. It was the first dig­i­tal sys­tem cam­era for under $1000, at that time my entry into dig­i­tal SLR pho­tog­ra­phy. How­ev­er, I had not yet seen the “sweet spot” in drone devel­op­ment for photography.

My minimal requirements for photo drones

In terms of image qual­i­ty in pho­tog­ra­phy, my cur­rent min­i­mum is a res­o­lu­tion of about 20 megapix­els (even the new Canon EOS R6 or the pro­fes­sion­al DSLR Canon EOS 1DX III don’t have a high­er res­o­lu­tion) and a 1″ sen­sor, cor­re­spond­ing to the sen­sor size of my Sony RX-100 VI, which I like to use for small­er city trips. In good light, it deliv­ers quite usable results.

Since my drone will usu­al­ly be used dur­ing the day in good light for land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy, and the object iso­la­tion achiev­able with a large sen­sor should not be an issue, this seemed suf­fi­cient for the begin­ning. Where­by thanks to the excel­lent sta­bi­liza­tion of the cur­rent drones in poor light­ing con­di­tions, long expo­sures are def­i­nite­ly pos­si­ble. More about this later.

Inter­change­able lens­es or a zoom lens on the drone seemed to be unnec­es­sary. A good wide-angle lens should be suf­fi­cient. Since the drone is fly­ing, it is no prob­lem to fly clos­er to or fur­ther away from a sub­ject. If it should be even more wide-angled, you can also stitch panora­mas, but more about that later.

In addi­tion, the mod­el should be eas­i­ly trans­portable, oth­er­wise I would cer­tain­ly not use it in the field. A fold­ing mech­a­nism for the rotor arms, as pre­sent­ed by DJI for the first time in 2016 with the DJI Mav­ic, seems to be opti­mal. The drone should fit in my back­pack next to my cam­era gear or be stow­able in a small extra bag. The bat­tery capac­i­ty should also be suf­fi­cient for longer day trips. Pro­fes­sion­al drones often only have flight times in the sin­gle-dig­it minute range.

Until now, the cheap­est mod­el with this spec­i­fi­ca­tion was the Mav­ic Pro 2 with just such a 20 megapix­el 1″ sen­sor and Has­sel­blad optics (The tra­di­tion­al cam­era com­pa­ny Has­sel­blad has been acquired by DJI). I had already flirt­ed with it sev­er­al times before, but the price and the weight were still a bit too high for me. But then appeared in April 2021 the

DJI Air 2S

with very sim­i­lar spec­i­fi­ca­tions com­pared to the Mav­ic 2 Pro, in some cas­es even bet­ter func­tion­al­i­ties, and a com­bat price of under $1,000. It too has a 1″ sen­sor with a res­o­lu­tion of 20 megapix­els (3:2 for­mat, 5472 x 3648 pix­els), a wide-angle lens cor­re­spond­ing to a full­frame focal length of 22.4mm. Lens move­ment and sta­bi­liza­tion is han­dled by a 3-axis gim­bal. While the lens does not wear the Has­sel­blad logo, it is also of very good qual­i­ty as far as I can tell so far. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, the adjustable aper­ture that was still present on the Mav­ic 2 Pro has been omit­ted, so that it is only pos­si­ble to shoot at open aper­ture (at f/2.8).

Due to the Coro­na pan­dem­ic, we had planned a vaca­tion trip by car to Switzer­land this year. I there­fore looked into Switzerland’s drone reg­u­la­tions and was pleased to find that there are cur­rent­ly only few restric­tions in our vaca­tion area (Engadin). Switzer­land has not yet adopt­ed the stricter EU reg­u­la­tions and is cur­rent­ly stick­ing to its own less restric­tive reg­u­la­tions. This would there­fore be an ide­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to get fur­ther into drone photography.

When I saw an offer on ama­zon, I decid­ed to buy it (but of course it did­n’t stay at $1000,-, because I had cho­sen the “fly more com­bo” with “care refresh”). One day lat­er the Air 2S arrived. I charged the bat­ter­ies, attached the eID and went out­side. I had already had my first drone expe­ri­ence with its lit­tle sis­ter, the DJI Mini 2, drone insur­ance and pilot reg­is­tra­tion were in place, and the oper­a­tion of both con­trollers is identical.

How to fly a drone?

For those who have nev­er oper­at­ed a drone before, the fol­low­ing is a brief basic intro­duc­tion to the subject:

Before fly­ing in pub­lic for the first time, two things must be clar­i­fied first accord­ing to cur­rent leg­is­la­tion (at least in the EU):

1. You need a drone lia­bil­i­ty insur­ance. If you already have a pri­vate lia­bil­i­ty insur­ance, you can ask the insur­er whether they offer an exten­sion in this regard. Oth­er­wise, there are many cheap offers, I myself have signed a drone insur­ance via the mobile app GETSAFE and cur­rent­ly pay € 3.55 per month.
2. In order to oper­ate a drone in pub­lic space, reg­is­tra­tion as a drone pilot is gen­er­al­ly required. In Ger­many, the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty is respon­si­ble for this. Reg­is­tra­tion can be done online and is cur­rent­ly free of charge. You will receive an eID from there, which must be attached to the drone. For drones weigh­ing 250g or more, includ­ing the DJI air 2S, the so-called “small drone license” is also required.

I have already giv­en address­es and fur­ther details in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle. For the first flight attempts, you should choose an open remote place and check whether drone flights are allowed there. There are also suit­able mobile phone apps for this, such as DRONIQ or Map2Fly for Ger­many. Of course, the weath­er should also be suit­able; the UAV Fore­cast app pro­vides very use­ful infor­ma­tion on this. If these con­di­tions are all met and the bat­ter­ies are ful­ly charged, you can start flying.

The operation

of cur­rent drones is now extreme­ly easy thanks to the sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nol­o­gy. Basi­cal­ly, thanks to GPS/GLONASS and a built-in com­pass, they are able to deter­mine their posi­tion accu­rate­ly at any time and main­tain it in the air with­out fur­ther inter­ven­tion of the “pilot”. This works even in strong winds up to a cer­tain strength with­out any prob­lems. As soon as you pow­er it up, the drone starts track­ing GPS satel­lites and accu­rate­ly deter­mines its posi­tion. As soon as this is done, the DJI app sends a cor­re­spond­ing spo­ken message.

All func­tions are con­trolled with the includ­ed remote con­trol via bidi­rec­tion­al radio trans­mis­sion. This has a real­ly remark­able range (accord­ing to offi­cial infor­ma­tion from DJI 8-12km with a clear line of sight). How­ev­er, accord­ing to the cur­rent legal reg­u­la­tions, drones are not allowed to be flown out­side of the line of sight any­way. At the same time, the drone sends a live video image from its cam­era back to the remote control.

The mon­i­tor for most con­sumer drones, includ­ing the Mini 2 and Air 2S, are mobile phones (iPhones and Android phones are sup­port­ed), which are con­nect­ed to the remote con­trol with a USB cable and mount­ed to it with a clamp. On the mobile phone, an APP (here the DJI Fly App) receives the data and dis­plays it on the cell phone screen:

The screen of the cell phone then dis­plays all essen­tial infor­ma­tion as well as the cur­rent video image from the drone. In the pic­ture below, the drone is still on the ground, but has already been “ready for take­off”. The video mode with the high­est res­o­lu­tion (5.4K 30) is set. You can switch to pho­to mode on the con­troller at any time by press­ing the but­ton at the top right of the right joystick.

The drone can then be start­ed via the icon and longer pres­sure on a start but­ton that then appears cen­tral­ly on the cell phone screen. This effec­tive­ly elim­i­nates the pos­si­bil­i­ty of unin­ten­tion­al acti­va­tion. The rotors then start auto­mat­i­cal­ly, the drone takes off and hov­ers on the spot at a height of about 1.2m.

Con­trol­ling the drone is sim­ple and intu­itive using the two joy­sticks. The left joy­stick con­trols alti­tude and rota­tion, while the right one moves the drone for­ward, back­ward or to the sides. A rotary wheel on the left shoul­der can be used to raise or low­er the cam­era. After a short famil­iar­iza­tion, this works with­out any prob­lems. If you release both joy­sticks, the drone hov­ers at its cur­rent position.

It could hard­ly be sim­pler. To land, sim­ply fly to the desired suit­able flat land­ing spot and move the left joy­stick down until the drone hits the ground. It then stops the rotors auto­mat­i­cal­ly. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can press and hold the “Return to home” but­ton on the con­troller (cen­ter left). The drone will then first fly to the pre­set safe alti­tude (to avoid acci­den­tal­ly col­lid­ing with trees or build­ings), then return to the start­ing point at this alti­tude, and final­ly land slow­ly on its own. This also hap­pens auto­mat­i­cal­ly if the radio sig­nal is lost or the bat­tery runs out. You can start shoot­ing either with the but­ton on the right of the phone or with the right shoul­der but­ton on the controller.

The cur­rent­ly select­ed shoot­ing mode is dis­played above the round but­ton on the right; the icon means, for exam­ple, that you are in video mode. To change the mode, sim­ply tap the icon and anoth­er selec­tion menu will open. In the exam­ple below, the pho­to mode with sin­gle image record­ing was select­ed in this way:

The Smart mode, which is also avail­able there, takes sev­er­al shots with dif­fer­ent expo­sure para­me­ters and cal­cu­lates an opti­mized image from them. Since I always do this myself in post-pro­cess­ing and the mode only cre­ates a JPG file, I don’t use it. In addi­tion, expo­sure brack­et­ing with 3 or 5 expo­sures and con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing can be selected.

In sin­gle shot mode, the bot­tom of the image shows, that the mem­o­ry card still has room for 4519 expo­sures in com­bined JPG and RAW for­mat. An expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion of -0.3 is set here and the auto­mat­ic expo­sure ( ) is active. The set­tings can be changed direct­ly by tap­ping the cor­re­spond­ing val­ue. This can then also be used to switch to man­u­al mode ( ).

If you slide up the right menu col­umn, you can select the four avail­able panora­ma modes at the bot­tom. I use these very often, as they are con­ve­nient for cre­at­ing wide-angle high-res­o­lu­tion images. Below there is a spher­i­cal panora­ma selected:

In addi­tion, the avail­able video modes, Mas­ter­Shots, Quick­Shot and Hyper­lapse sequences can be select­ed between these menu items. I don’t want to go into these fur­ther here, as there is enough mate­r­i­al on the Inter­net about them, as here we are pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with photography.

First results

For the first flight tests with the new­ly acquired DJI Air 2S, I chose our “local moun­tain” in War­burg, the Desen­berg with the cas­tle ruins on it. I was par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the dynam­ic range of the 1″ sen­sor. As always with my cam­eras, I work with the Air 2S exclu­sive­ly with RAW files. It sup­ports the wide­ly used DNG for­mat, which is direct­ly sup­port­ed by vir­tu­al­ly all RAW con­vert­ers. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, you can only choose between sav­ing JPG and JPG+DNG, so I always have to man­u­al­ly delete the JPG data that is super­flu­ous for me. First, as a first exam­ple, a shot from my first flight with­out any pro­cess­ing in Lightroom:

I then processed the raw image file (in DNG for­mat) in Light­room and was amazed how much detail was still present in both high­lights and shadows:

The sharp­ness is also quite good, here is a detail of the above image in 100% magnification:

In addi­tion to the well-func­tion­ing auto­mat­ic mode (aper­ture pri­or­i­ty at open aper­ture f/2.8 - the Air 2S lens unfor­tu­nate­ly does not have an adjustable aper­ture, the Mav­ic 2 Pro can do that bet­ter), all expo­sure para­me­ters (expo­sure time, ISO val­ue, white bal­ance) can be set man­u­al­ly on the Air 2s. The lens fea­tures aut­o­fo­cus, you can select a focus point man­u­al­ly by tap­ping on the screen. How­ev­er, the focus can also be set man­u­al­ly if desired. Due to the rel­a­tive­ly small sen­sor size and the wide-angle optics (KB equiv­a­lent 22.4mm), you usu­al­ly don’t have to wor­ry about this though, all pic­tures are usu­al­ly in focus automatically.

Unlike the Mini 2, the Air 2S offers an easy option to use fil­ters in front of the lens. The “Fly more com­bo” already comes with 4 ND fil­ters from ND4 to ND32. How­ev­er, these are actu­al­ly only nec­es­sary in video mode. How­ev­er, a polar­iz­ing fil­ter is use­ful in land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy, which I use prac­ti­cal­ly all the time in sun­shine. I have already dealt with this in more detail in my pre­vi­ous drone arti­cle and also here, so I won’t repeat it here.

Exposure bracketing

In addi­tion to sin­gle shot mode, the DJi Air 2s also sup­ports con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing, inter­val shoot­ing and expo­sure brack­et­ing (AEB) with 3 or 5 shots in incre­ments of 2/3 stops. I have also devel­oped the above image as an HDR from 5 AEB shots in Lightroom:

To be hon­est, thanks to the high dynam­ic range of the 1″ sen­sor, I don’t see any sig­nif­i­cant gain here. How­ev­er, the func­tion has the advan­tage that you can select the opti­mal­ly exposed image from the expo­sure series for fur­ther pro­cess­ing. This is the image that just has suf­fi­cient detail in the high­lights. In this case it was the image exposed with +2/3. I there­fore use the AEB mode fre­quent­ly and with pleasure.

May it be a little more?

As men­tioned above, I am used to the EOS R5 with its 45 megapix­el res­o­lu­tion. I also have wider-angle lens­es (up to 14mm) avail­able there, which I like to use fre­quent­ly, espe­cial­ly for land­scape shots. Even before that, I often cre­at­ed panora­ma shots from sev­er­al sin­gle shots with my cam­eras, e.g. here. Even most cur­rent mobile phones have such a func­tion, where you pan the phone slow­ly from side to side.

This func­tion is also sup­port­ed by the DJI Air 2s, which even per­forms it com­plete­ly auto­mat­i­cal­ly. Since the drone rotates opti­mal­ly on the spot, there are also prac­ti­cal­ly no par­al­lax errors, which often make post-pro­cess­ing of con­ven­tion­al shots with­out a tri­pod very difficult.

The DJI Air 2S offers 4 panora­ma modes:

• A wider angle panora­ma from 9 shots (3x3)
• A hor­i­zon­tal 180° panora­ma from 21 shots (3x7)
• A ver­ti­cal panora­ma from 3 shots
• And an almost com­plete spher­i­cal panora­ma of 26 shots.

“Almost com­plete” because the cam­era can only tilt up about 30° due to the rotors and the cen­tral part of the sky is there­fore miss­ing from the image. By default, the Airs 2S can also stitch the panora­mas itself, but this again only gen­er­ates a JPG file and some­times only works insufficiently.

There­fore, I always com­pose the indi­vid­ual shots myself from the cre­at­ed indi­vid­ual DNG files. To do this, I either use the panora­ma mode avail­able in Light­room Clas­sic or, for more com­plex panora­mas, the spe­cial­ized pro­gram PTGui, which offers many more options and can, for exam­ple, also cre­ate the so-called “Lit­tle Plan­et” panora­mas. I like and often use the 3x3 panora­ma, which gives an image width com­pa­ra­ble to a 14mm lens:

By stitch­ing the images togeth­er, the pix­el count of the cre­at­ed panora­ma is also increased. The processed panora­ma above has a res­o­lu­tion of 9736x6060 pix­els, i.e. 59 megapix­els. The image can be print­ed as a large for­mat poster with­out any prob­lems. Here is a detail of the above image in 100% resolution:

By the way, I delib­er­ate­ly use the auto­mat­ic expo­sure of the Air 2S in panora­ma mode. The indi­vid­ual images are then exposed dif­fer­ent­ly (in the above series from 1/100 to 1/320). How­ev­er, each indi­vid­ual image uses the dynam­ic range of the sen­sor opti­mal­ly. In my expe­ri­ence, the unavoid­able dif­fer­ences in bright­ness of the indi­vid­ual images are excel­lent­ly com­pen­sat­ed by Light­room Clas­sic and PTGui when stitch­ing them together.

Little Planet

A spe­cial form of pre­sent­ing a 360° panora­ma is the so-called “Lit­tle Plan­et”. The image sec­tion shown in this way cor­re­sponds approx­i­mate­ly to the image of a 180° fish eye direct­ed down­wards. The result­ing round panora­mas look like lit­tle plan­ets. This effect can be cre­at­ed very eas­i­ly from the images tak­en with the “Spher­i­cal Panora­ma” func­tion of the Air 2S using the panora­ma pro­gram PTGui:

The effect is amaz­ing. For com­par­i­son, here is a con­ven­tion­al 360° panora­ma in land­scape for­mat cre­at­ed from the same shots:

Since the image was cre­at­ed from 26 indi­vid­ual shots, the lev­el of detail is almost unbe­liev­able. The orig­i­nal panora­ma in land­scape for­mat has a size of 21560 x 6627 pix­els, i.e. more than 140 megapix­els. The “Lit­tle Plan­et” panora­ma even reach­es 29232 x 22160 pix­els, which is almost 650 megapix­els. The sharp­ness is still very good even at pix­el lev­el, as the fol­low­ing 100% crop from the image above shows:

A real plea­sure for every pixelpeeper!

And in darkness?

I had already expressed my con­cerns about the low-light capa­bil­i­ties of the 1″ sen­sor in the Air 2S above. I already know this from my Sony RX100, which I don’t like to use with high­er ISO val­ues. In fact, noise arti­facts are already vis­i­ble at ISO val­ues of 400 on the DJI Air 2S:

Here is a detail of the image above in 100% magnification:

Although noise reduc­tion in Light­room can still improve the pic­ture, this is always at the expense of details. In my opin­ion, you should not go beyond ISO 400.

What real­ly impressed me about this shot, how­ev­er, was the fan­tas­tic sta­bi­liza­tion of the cam­era by the gim­bal. Since the above image was not blurred despite a rel­a­tive­ly long expo­sure time of 1/13 in windy weath­er, I won­dered whether longer expo­sure times are still usable.

Long time exposures

For this pur­pose, I have cho­sen the Mal­o­ja Pass in Bergell as a test sub­ject. Here a pass road goes very steeply from the Engadin (approx. 1,800m) down into the Bergell. The road has very nar­row ser­pen­tines, which should look very impres­sive from a bird’s eye view? So I drove there one evening and test­ed long time expo­sures with up to 10 sec­onds expo­sure time. Even with this long expo­sure time, at least 50% of the shots were sharp, anoth­er 25% showed slight blur­ring, but were still usable. Over­all, a very impres­sive per­for­mance of the small drone. Here is a nice example:

And again the 100% crop from the above image:

And for com­par­i­son the blur­ri­est image from my series of 6 shots with 10 sec­onds expo­sure time each, again in 100% magnification:

Final­ly, I over­laid the indi­vid­ual shots cre­at­ed in this way in Pho­to­shop to include the light traces of the vehi­cles. After fur­ther pro­cess­ing, the final result looks like this:

Resumée

Dur­ing our trip to Switzer­land, the new DJI Air 2S has changed my pho­to habits sig­nif­i­cant­ly. In fact, dur­ing the 2 weeks, I took twice as many pic­tures with the drone as with my EOS cam­eras. This is large­ly due to the fact that I often used the panora­ma mode, which result­ed in 9 - 26 indi­vid­ual shots. After pro­cess­ing the pho­tos, the qual­i­ty of the images excites me more and more. I have there­fore select­ed for a new pho­to cal­en­dar this time exclu­sive­ly images that were tak­en with the drones.

Who wants to see more drone images in high­er res­o­lu­tion: My new cal­en­dar ” Schweiz - Engadin und Bergell” with 13 drone images is now avail­able in the for­mats Din-A2 to Din-A5 at Cal­ven­do or also via ama­zon*. It is in ger­man lan­guage, an eng­lish ver­sion will fol­low soon.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive are the images in the for­mat Din-A2 as a fine arts print.

*= Affil­i­ate Link