Is it Possible?

Think of the times you wanted to photograph a waterfall but can’t because you would either have to ford the stream to get to the other side where the waterfall can be seen or rappel down the side of a cliff to get down to the waterfall buried deep inside a gorge.

A drone in both cases can help you take those shots.

Waterfall Photography

But photographing waterfalls is all about controlling movement—movement of the water, specifically. To make the waterfall look like what our eyes see—milky and feathery white instead of the millions of water droplets suspended in the air—we need to control the water’s movement by slowing down our shutter speed to about a second or so. And to shoot anything at that slow speed, forget about waterfalls, we will need a tripod if we don’t want our image blurred by our unsteady hands.

Can a drone do this?

Six Degrees of Freedom

A drone is essentially a tripod in the air. It uses a hardware-based gimbal and software-based electronic image stabilization to keep the image still in the camera’s lens. The resulting image, as the video shows, is comparable to the milky, feathery white waterfall we are accustomed to taken by tripod-mounted cameras.

A drone can be a powerful and indispensable tool in a waterfall photographer’s arsenal. It offers six degrees of freedom: forward/back, up/down, left/right. We have complete freedom in framing our shots without ever leaving our spot.

Flying safely and respectfully

Although drones are still expensive, used ones especially of previous models can be bought for less. Still, flying a drone can be nerve-wracking as it is so easy to crash them, even for experienced remote pilots.

But as beginners, if we restrict the use of our drone to photographing waterfalls only, where the drone is always just a few steps away and never leaves our sight—and not, say, flying high in the sky surveying the landscape just because we can—then we will never have to worry about our expensive drone crashing irretrievably far away from us. We can save such adventures for later as we gain experience.

And, lastly, we should always be respectful by not even pulling our drone out of our bag when there are others around who, like us, also came to enjoy Nature. There will always be a next time. If not, then we can always pull out our trusty old camera and tripod from our bag instead.