Abstract Aerials

Life is all about your perspective, how you see the world. As a photographer I see the world a bit differently. I continuously see things in my world that I would like to make into photographs. But I have always seen these things from one perspective, on my own two feet. Until I started experimenting with aerial photography. When you see the world from four hundred feet in the air, it changes your perspective. It makes you feel small. It reminds you that what you are seeing with your eyes on your feet is so little of the world around you.

I created these images with a DJI Mavic 2 Zoom drone. Shooting with the drone has taught me to slow down and look around more. I spend more time in the air looking for interesting compositions in many new angles, positions, and distances than when I am on the ground. I also spend a lot of time positioning the drone with micro movements to get the right angle or straighten out an object. It’s a whole new experience.

Observing the world from above made me see some new things. I started to look at patterns we create on a large scale. I started to think about how we manipulate our landscapes and the effect that may have on them and on us. I started to notice that as humans we like order, repetition, patterns, and we are very creative. I like to think that shooting in the air and looking at the bigger landscape must be how architects look at plans for a building and how landscape artists look at their designs for the land and how farmers think about the most efficient way to plant their crops. Even things as insignificant as how many cars can fit in a parking lot and how someone designed that space become interesting.

All of these ideas are new to me. Seeing the world in this new perspective is very odd, an abstract way of thinking and of seeing. Everything looks so new and different up in the air. You get a bit disoriented thinking about where you are and what you are looking at. Familiar things start to feel unfamiliar. This is where the concept of abstract aerials comes from. That feeling of being somewhere and seeing things you know in a new way. The unfamiliarity of this new perspective.

In these images I wanted to focus on the unusual objects we never see at a distance or from directly above. I wanted to emphasize the patterns, repetitions, textures, and abstract nature of aerial photography. I chose to make them monochromatic to emphasize these elements and to abstract them a bit more. I experimented with many subject matters, from rural to urban, man-made to natural and some things in between. I found the same elements in all subject matter I observed. I like to see how humans cut through the landscape, how we manipulate it to our liking, how a natural pattern is interrupted by our influence.

I hope that in observing my work you think about the world in a new way and realize how small you are as one human but how big of an impact we make as a whole. Maybe these images will help us all to see that a bit more clearly.