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

Abstract

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 hires 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.

Protect Your Sky: A Survey of Counter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems

“…VOLUME 0, 2018 1) Rapid Growth of UAVs and Their Applications Applications of UAVs range from recreation to commercial and military applications, including enjoyment, hobbies, and games with drones, the filming of movies for recreation [2]- [4], and the operation of UAVs for military purposes [5]- [11]. As reported by the federal aviation administration (FAA) in the United States (US), there are 1, 692, 700 registered drones (approximately, 29% for commercial and 71% for recreation) in the US as of September 2020 [12].…”

“…Transferring medicines and vaccines, packages, food, and other small goods into out of remote or H2A regions [16]- [19], [63]- [65] Recreation Film creation, photography, racing, and commercial advertisements, and DIY HW/SW [2]- [4], [66] IT services UAVs as BSs, relays, and data correctors for enhancing the quality of IT services using, e.g., broadband communication systems, IoT systems, and cellular systems [22]- [27], [43], [67]- [80] UAVs, however, can monitor a complete area at a glance from the sky or a specific spot while flying at that spot, meaning that they can cover a target area without blind and/or occluded spots. UAVs can patrol to monitor and detect instances of spontaneous combustion at a relatively low cost.…”

“…The network should be inter-operable and compatible so that it can coordinate multiple platforms. For example, a static ground platform equipped with radar, two LAPs equipped with an EO sensor, and a mobile ground platform providing RF jamming can be cooperatively operated as a unified CUS network 2 . The CUS network can maximize the effectiveness of defense by complementing the limitations of each platform.…”

Drone Detection and Defense Systems: Survey and a Software-Defined Radio-Based Solution

“…Applications of UAVs range from recreation to commercial and military applications, including enjoyment, hobbies, games with drones, homemade entertainment videos, recreational movies [4][5][6], low altitude flying base stations [7], and the operation of UAVs for military purposes [8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

A flow disturbance estimation and rejection strategy for multirotors with round-trip trajectories

“…Multirotors are widely used in the urban areas. Initially utilized as a new paradigm in the field of photography [1], usage of these vehicles has been extending to entertainment [2], [3], cleaning windows and solar cells [4], and inspection of urban areas [5]. Among many other possible usages, delivery is one of the most practical applications, not only as a future of package delivery system [6], but also as a present solution, such as blood delivery [7].…”