Drone News

DJI launched its new Phantom 3 drone to much fanfare yesterday with potential pilots most jazzed about the surprisingly reasonable price ($1,259 for the Pro model, and $999 for the Advanced) and the new features (4K video and live streaming) of this UAV.

By now, drone assisted cinematography (and photography) is really noting new but the people at the Brain Farm have just taken it to an entirely new and very exciting level. The idea behind this innovative experiment was to move beyond the usual “GoPro-style” set up by equipping a large pro quality drone (an Aerigon UAV model) with a massive Phantom Flex4K slow motion camera, at a total price tag of about a quarter of a million dollars worth of airborne gear.

The moment imaging drone pilots have been waiting for with a mixture of dread and anticipation is finally here and there’s good news for aerial photographers...sort of.

If you haven’t seen this epic drone video yet, it should help you get over the Monday blues. (And even if you’ve already seen it, it’s definitely worth watching again for a few laughs.)

Lots of people do dumb things with their imaging drones but this is one of the dumber – though oddly satisfying – clips we’ve seen.

Drone photography is here to stay, whether the government likes it or not. That’s one of the messages from an intriguing roundtable discussion piece titled “Those Daring Photographers and Their Flying Machines” in an upcoming issue of Shutterbug magazine. In the story, written by Lorin Robinson, three experienced imaging drone pilots share their thoughts on this controversial topic, in what amounts to part “state of the drone industry” and part call to arms.

One of the cooler (or geekier, depending on your perspective) imaging products being shown off at the PhotoPlus Expo show in New York City is a high-performance, remote-controlled car designed to help shoot high-speed tracking video. Called the Tero, the miniature vehicle is being sold by Freefly Systems, which created the vaunted 3-axis MoVI stabilizer camera gimbal.