I drive over the whole state for work, let alone my own personal aerial photos. New Jersey is a bigger state than I had ever thought it was. My theory is that if you look hard enough, you can find a lot of very interesting things to shoot. I’ve heard that you have to travel to take good pictures and all these other wild things that aren’t true at all. I’ve heard a lot of people say that NJ is boring and that there’s nowhere to really shoot. I have to be honest, I feel like I have but at the same time I continue to look for more and more places to shoot every day I can. Living in NJ for a majority of my life and growing up doing photography here, you’d think I would run out of places to shoot. （in NJ and Any Other Place You Travel To) I see these cameras get better and better and they never seem to let me down. I will add that I have been very impressed with the camera technology that DJI has. If I find something I really like or would like to shoot in better quality, I will eventually go back to that location with my Inspire and use it to shoot. I even use the Mavic to scout locations just to get an idea of what I could shoot there. When I am on the go and want to just grab some quick photos, the Mavic is always my go to. Even when traveling for fun, I’ll be sure to have my Mavics on me just in case I spot anything that interests me 🙂 Just remember, as long as you have a drone, you will be able to fly one whenever you need to. I use each drone for a different reason and usually travel with all of them on me for work. Owning three drones, you could say I have some choices but to be completely honest, I do prefer flying my Mavic Pro a majority of the time because of its size and performance compared to the other drones. Since I do a lot of work with drone, I have the option of flying the Inspire 2, X5S and whatever lens I want, the Mavic Pro or the Mavic Air. This is actually completely up to you as well. Always better safe than sorry in this case, so please use your best judgment before going out to fly. Losing your drone is probably not a fun thing, especially when you know that you didn’t have to be flying in the crazy conditions you were in. If the weather is bad and you know it may be too risky to fly, please don’t chance it. I was definitely mad, but I learned my lesson and ended up scouting a few of the locations so I had an idea of the area before I returned to fly again. That being said, it just wasn’t worth the risk and I decided to just put the drone away and surrender to the weather. If I did take my drone up, it wasn’t safe to fly it more than 100ft away from me because it was so hard to get it back. In fact, I made the same mistake a few months back and I could not fly at any of the locations I went to because the winds were consistently blowing 20+mph. Remember, this is 100% your fault because all you had to do was check the weather. When you drive a good distance only to find out that you can’t fly there, you may be pretty disappointed. This could make or break your shoot, especially if you are planning it out in advance. Weather is an absolute essential to check. I am typically shooting during sunset so I tend to fly before that golden hour to see what I want to capture when the light is where I want it to be. One tip I have for everyone flying is to arrive at your location early and get a flight in before hand to scout the location and get a few test shots. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to find a perfect location to create great images but it does help. This has been huge for me lately because I haven’t been able to go out and shoot as much as I’d like, but by doing this I’m able to find spots where I can hit a bunch of places within a certain distance in one route.įinding a good location is key to getting good photos. All I have to do is get in the car, open maps, tap the spot I’d like to go to and drive there. I can see all of my pins on both my phone and computer which makes things really convenient. I like to organize by state or theme (ie: VA travel or Tennis Courts). I remember where these places are because I simply pin them and them save them to a list on Google Maps. I always want to make sure a spot is worth it so I constantly search google maps for places to fly. Location is one of the first things I look at before even shooting with the drone. If you are super busy but still love to shoot, I would definitely recommend mapping out your photography sessions. I like to map out my shooting sessions well in advance so I can choose the exact days and times when I know I’ll be able to capture the exact image I want. Planning is one of the most important aspects of aerial photography.

Drone station locations breakpoint map