[Leica] Drones for photography

[lrzeitlin at aol.com]

There are indeed restrictions on using drones in many municipalities 
and National Parks in the USA. The FAA has also chimed in and 
restricted the use of drones above 300 feet. I may be wrong on the 
exact altitude. Most of the restrictions involve commercial use of the 
drones. Amateur photographers are granted a lot of leeway although 
there is a court case pending in Cold Spring, NY about the use of a 
drone to take videos of a wedding. Most of the commercial drones are 
fairly big, a couple of feet across, and fully capable of carrying a 
couple of pounds of camera gear and a TV link. The Amazon thingies 
neither have the lifting capacity not the range to get the pictures 
shown in Jayanand's posting of Guardian images. One town has even 
authorized gun owners to shoot down drones that they consider intrusive.

Or you can sidestep the entire issue and use a kite. My nephew has 
taken some decent pictures with a camera strapped to a box kite. He has 
a good quality Canon P&S camera with a large capacity memory and a 
timer set to take a picture every couple of seconds. The kite is flown 
over a site and the camera snaps pictures. The kite is stable and very 
controllable. Editing is a chore since only one out of a dozen pictures 
is useful but he is entirely legal. So far no marksmen have taken 
potshots at his kite.
Larry Z
- - - -

I think there are restrictions on them in the parks . . .

. . . the quality of the cameras on board is pretty good on some of 
them.


On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Bob Adler <rgacpa at gmail.com> wrote:

Yes! Throwing one off glacier point in Yosemite or skimming up the 
Merced
to Yosemite Falls would be wonderful fun.

I've been learning on these little quad copters from amazon. Lots of fun
(the cat has a different opinion).

My concern, of course, is strapping a couple thousand in camera gear to 
a
thousand+ of drone equipment and losing it all.

So I have not gone down the path. However the little $30 buzzers from
amazon are GREAT fun!
Bob

Bob Adler

On Jul 23, 2014, at 1:38 AM, Jayanand Govindaraj <jayanand at gmail.com>
wrote:

>From a drone. I am seriously getting tempted to acquire a drone...


www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/jul/21/aerial-views-of-india-by-dr
one-in-pictures

Cheers
Jayanand