From Passion to Profit
How a drone hobbyist hovered his way into the big leagues
I’ve been passionate about photography for a long time. What I really loved was that you could capture a subject from a multitude of angles. When I saw that people were capturing low altitude aerial shots using drones, I was hooked, I knew I needed a drone!
Being led by my passion is what got me to where I am today. Now, I train, educate, and provide drone equipment to top tier corporations who are utilising drones to improve productivity, safety, and accuracy in the services and products they provide. -Andor Süli
That about sums up Andor Suli’s journey with drones. Starting with a GoPro strapped to an RC helicopter and leading on to fully integrated multi-sensor heavy lift and agricultural drones, Andor has had his hand on nearly every part of drone evolution in their accelerated development pathway.
He’s always had a love for photography and the ability to capture a single subject from a multitude of angels. Beginning in 2013, Andor noted that pioneers in drone photography were capturing low-level aerial photos providing a new and unexplored aspect to his hobby.
It’s the passion for our hobbies that allows us to push on when a challenge or obstacle presents itself. When I started with drones, there was simply nothing off the shelf to let you remotely control and stream from a camera mounted to a drone. It was up to the user to find, lean about, and implement either new hardware or to try and follow the undocumented efforts of others. I think it was the belief that I was really going to take a great photos, led me to continue tinkering with adapting a camcorder for use on a drone. Adapting action cameras was a bit easier as they’re purpose built to get mounted to anything. -Andor Süli
As a hobbyist photographer who was already working in sales, Andor’s passion and experience with drones is probably what led a friend to give him an introduction to Duplitec, Hungary’s largest DJI reseller and founder of the first DJI retail outlet in the country. Since starting in 2017, he has provided service and solutions to every segment Duplitec’s clientele. Beginning with retail sales, he transitioned to becoming the store manager, and then to the enterprise business unit.
After seven years going full throttle with drones, what keeps him interested in drones?
Working for a DJI reseller gives Andor free and early access to all the greatest technology. “It feeds my passion” says Andor, affording him the opportunity to develop his skills and technique. When it come to his passion, capturing top-down or birds-eye views of the earth are what he likes. His favourite subjects include architecture, urban landscapes, and authigenic (‘manmande’) geometrical patterns .
Sharing is caring as they say, is this true for drone photos?
As there are many venues for sharing drone photos it’s easy to blend in with all the other millions of photos or tens of thousands of drone photos. Finding a platform like Soar, with it’s unique focus on top down photography let’s pilots like Andor focus on the type of photos he prefers to take. Likewise, he reckon’s the geospatial element to the Soar platform helps users quickly locate the images they either want to buy or just browse.
For the leisure time work you do, what drone works the best?
According to Andor, the DJI Mavic 2 Pro, is the overall goto drone for his style of photos. The portability, image quality, and connectivity ensure that he can take architectural photos whenever he finds an interesting subject and with a 1 inch sensor, you can’t capture images at any higher resolution with a drone that size. Lastly, the connectivity is so strong that he rarely experiences limited connectivity, especially within line of sight.
Drone safety is a big concern for Andor. Working in the industry, he’s seen plenty of cowboys taking risks and generally ruining it for everyone. “Usually those types are new to drones, or don’t have anything to lose, but this is my livelihood and I want others to enjoy it as much as I have done for the last seven years”.
What’s next?
Andor has been fortunate to see how camera sensor and form-factor have improved and believes this is where improvements for consumer drones are most likely. For industrial applications, there’s greater scope for cargo/delivery enhancements as well as intervention for public health issues such as Covid-19. Andor and his colleagues currently have their hands full providing solutions for government agencies finding new and innovative ways to combat the virus using drones.
If you are keen to work with drones, Andor has some advice.
Practice, everyone says that but take a look at what others are successful with and work towards getting there. It will achieve three things;
- You’ll get experience framing shots and planning their composition
- You’ll become adept at using enhancement software like Photoshop and you’ll develop skills at making normal shots more appealing
- The hours spent flying a drone means you’re safer and have the control to smoothly capture video shots or position your drone the right way to get a good shot and multiple perspectives in less time.
Not everyone needs to be a creative ninja. If you have in-depth knowledge of your drone’s capabilities and can use processing or mapping software you can consistently turn our quality products that people need on a regular basis. Our biggest industrial use for drones is cartography and modeling so if you can gain the knowledge to produce accurate maps/models in the format clients want them, you’ve got a solid product offering. Products like the Phantom 4 RTK provide a user with everything they need to deliver geospatial products according to their specifications.
The Soar platform continues to serve the needs drone image hungry consumers who are utilising drone images in news and media, construction, land management, resources, and many other critical industries. If you have a special technology use case challenge, the team at Soar is keen to assist and provide a solution. We monitor our SM feeds closely and are always quick to respond and reach out to our users and clients.
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