Drone Journalism Techniques in the Real World
When I first heard of the town of Calvinia, I had to look at a map. Where was this place? What did it look like?
I had heard that the town had run completely dry of water — the dam was empty, the river was empty- and people were surviving off of boreholes that had been drilled into the parched earth by the local government. It seemed like a perfect example of the devastation being wrought by the worst drought to hit South Africa in a generation.
I had taken photographs of the drought before, focusing on the dam levels in Cape Town. Though they were powerful, the photographs seemed to do little to prevent the city from constantly overreaching its targeted water use per day. When I heard of Calvinia, and the empty Karee Dam which sits next to it, I knew that it could be a perfect wake-up call to show Cape Townians “this is what could be” — a terrible vision of the future come to pass in this Northern Cape town.
Drone technology affords people the luxury of being able to present perspectives and angles on issues in an entirely new way. By seeing things differently, we are confronted with reality in a different way than we were before. It makes us think, and perhaps makes us act. I had seen just how powerful drone perspectives could be with my Unequal Scenes project. Now, I wanted to bring that to bear on the water crisis.
Luckily, Oxpeckers Investigative Environment Journalism was keen to team up and write a story on Calvinia’s struggle with water. I offered to fly the drone and to take still photos, video, and interviews of the townspeople. As a final package, we decided to use Shorthand, a scrolly-telling tool that is used by many media outlets as an easily-embedded multimedia web page.
Flying a drone when conducting journalism is a creative twinning of storytelling and beauty. I was lucky because the stark desert landscapes of the Karoo lend themselves to landscape photography, and the wide cameras mounted to normal commercial drones are primarily suited to landscape work. But what story could I tell besides just providing pretty photos? The answer was that I conducted my drone photojournalism in a very traditional way — meeting people, following them to work and to their homes, building trust, and then achieving photography that is respectful and yet still raw. Generally I started shooting with my stills camera, and eventually switched to my drone when I had built enough trust with the people I was with. In this sense, I could create a type of visual “tension” between the personal and the impersonal, that I found compelling.
A photojournalist once told me, “look for visual metaphors”. Drones can reveal patterns and see much differently than on the ground. Sometimes, this will present visual metaphors, or at least visual incongruities, that are striking. This provides context to the written story that is deep and rich with meaning. In the case of the Calvinia story, I found that metaphors presented themselves in sometimes serendipitous ways. For example, when photographing one of the 9 boreholes that supply the town with fresh groundwater, I noticed that a line of sheep were marching towards it. As sheep farming is an intensely water-intensive activity, due to the amount of vegetation they need to eat to survive and fatten themselves, it seemed the perfect opportunity to place them in the same shot — a shot impossible to achieve without being able to fly above them.
Lastly, drones can simply present stark, objective realities much like a map. I’ve found that people respond most viscerally to the aesthetic of the “nadir view”, that is, the view pointing straight down towards the ground. It’s important as a creative photographer to look for the most compelling nadir views however — its easy to think everything looks amazing. What is your image trying to say? Does it have more than one level of engagement? Does it further the story element you are highlighting? Is it more than just a “pretty picture”?
When photographing Calvinia two things became very apparent to me, and that was 1) how overwhelming the dry dam-bed looked when seen from high above, and 2) how insignificant the water treatment plant looked from above. The exaggeration of the enormity of losing all your water when looked at this way helps emotionally bolster the narrative of the story, and moreover, provides excellent negative space within which you can add text, graphics, or otherwise promote the story through banner images. Keeping all of this in mind will help your post-production and social media strategies from falling by the wayside.
When Towns Run Dry was featured by Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism. The multimedia investigation is part of a series for ImpactAfrica titled “ClimaTracker: what climate change means for your town”, which focuses on how local neighbourhoods survive disruption by global climate change.
