2017: Year of the Drone Selfie?

A (quite spectacular) drone selfie by MauroP.

First, let’s not call them selfies. I’m talking here about an image category that transcends the typical “fish gape” snapshot from a mobile’s front-facing camera.

Let’s call these personal establishing shots.

Movies have establishing shots, which Mediacollege.com defines as:

. . . [T]he first shot of a new scene, designed to show the audience where the action is taking place. It is usually a very wide shot or extreme wide shot.

So why can’t regular people have establishing shots too, and little flying robots to help take them? They can keep snapping the usual picnic shots, yes — the food closeups, the girlfriend coyly proffering a grape. But let them also capture the whole spread — people, pets, food and wine, red-and-white checkered tablecloth and wicker basket — from above, with the surrounding landscape, the field of lavender or grove of white Aspens, as powerful context.

If you look at the gorgeous imagery now flowing into Dronestegram.com, the new Instagram for drone photographers, you’ll see plenty of shots of the sort you’d expect, those evoking the helicopter-powered movie shots of yore: grand, sweeping aerial vistas of cities, forests, deserts, beaches, etc.

But you’ll also see low-altitude, oblique-angle shots of people living life, and it’s these I find the most interesting. Taken from a bird’s-eye not God’s-eye perspective, the people in them are recognizable and expressive, not ant-like or invisible.

These sorts of shots help tell a story.

Have a look at a few more recent examples from Dronestegram:

By AerialGuy259.

By rivanfmaulana.

By www.vnebo.com.ua.

State of the Tech for Drone-Powered Personal Establishing Shots

Most Dronestegram shots, whether from high or low altitude, are now captured by big drones, especially those from DJI (which Forbes says now has 70% of market share).

If you’re a nerd like me, you already have a drone, maybe a couple. You’ve flown them, crashed them, self-repaired them, and researched how to mod them for longer distance. But most people are not nerds. Most people won’t lug a full-sized drone to a picnic, or put in hours of practice to learn to fly well enough to overcome all the rookie mistakes that lead to crashes (even with the best tech).

For non-nerds to buy drones en masse, they need to operate like flying point-and-shoot cameras (and not cost much more than a non-flying one of those). The process for using drones like this — let’s call them near-space drones — needs to be simple:

• Remove drone from small bag
• Hand launch it, indoors or out, with minimal spectacle (people should not gather round to watch it fly; park rangers should not blurp their sirens in response)
• Have it fly where told by their mobile device while automatically avoiding obstacles and compensating for wind and weather
• Orient to and track subjects automatically
• Snap stunning, near-space photos and videos that make friends with mere selfie sticks green with envy.
• Land back in the hand and offer easy image sharing

Hovering over a hairpin curve in Chiang Mai, Thailand with my Hubsan hobby-grade quad.

No near-space drone yet ticks all those boxes, but they’re getting close, and, for a few reasons, 2017 could be the year such drones become popular:

1. Near-space is a niche that market-leader DJI hasn’t focused on. You could use their new Mavic to do quite a lot of the above, but it’s pricey. And, with their recent Hasselblad acquisition, they seem to be aiming up market, not down. (Drone racing is another niche which DJI seemingly has no interest in and which competitors will likely strive to fill this year.)
2. Drone sales at Christmas 2016 in the US were double over those of 2015. There’s clear demand for drones of all sorts.
3. Drones obey Moore’s Law too. Much of their core tech (batteries, procs, etc.) is based on mobile components (in fact, mobile chipset maker, Qualcomm, now has a dedicated drone platform called Snapdragon Flight). And just like your phone, drone models cycle fast and offer ever more features in an ever smaller form for an ever lower price. They’ll get better, cheaper, and smaller and will likely become ubiquitous for personal photography and for use cases that we’ve not yet imagined.
4. Image sharing on social media is a competitive sport. Like it or not, people compete with friends to post images with ever more wow, ever better production values. Near-space drones are an ideal weapon in that arms race. They blow out of the water any filter app or selfie stick.
5. In many places, near-space drones, because they’re small, are exempt from government registration.

Last year a few drones released for this niche. They included the Hover Camera and the oddly-named Dobby. The latter received the best reviews and came closest to hitting all the above features.

Chinese-language promo vid for the Dobby drone.

Famous vlogger Casey Niestat even gave the Dobby a go (and lost it on his first outdoor flight).

Yet if you search for Dobby shots on Dronestegram you’ll see very few of them. Granted, Dronestegram may have a pro bias, but it seems that near-space drones, even reasonably capable ones like the Dobby, have not yet broken through.

For all the above reasons, I think the tech for near-space will mature this year. CES 2017 offers even more evidence for this, with many folding drones, direct competitors to the Hover Camera, being announced.

But it will also take marketing. Shenzhen-based DJI managed over time to convince even the pros that it wasn’t just some knock-off manufacturer, that it could produce innovative kit that was up to snuff even for a demanding Hollywood production crew.

Near-space drone manufactures, most of which are also from Shenzhen, will have to pull off the same marketing feat with the average non-Chinese consumer. To achieve that, names like Dobby or promo vids like the above probably won’t cut it.