Drone Lighting

This guy coordinated five drones to light paint a giant footballer in the night sky

Apr 20, 2021 by John Aldred Add Comment

Light painting with drones has become quite popular over the last couple of years, but it’s still an extremely challenging thing to do. Achieving great results relies on a lot of factors. You need the right exposure for the ambient lit environment, you need the right brightness output on your drone’s lights and you need to fly your drones in just the right path relative to the camera (and at a consistent speed) to get nice clean lines of even colour.

That’s what makes this night sky light painting by Frodo Álvarez (who goes by the name Children of Darklight) so impressive. The video’s in Spanish, so you may need to turn on auto-translate, but he used five drones to create this amazing image of a footballer about to kick a ball, all floating above a football field. Yes, sorry America, this is football to the rest of the world.

This eerie short film was lit by a 1,600W LED drone light

Dec 20, 2018 by Dunja Djudjic 3 Comments

Drones give us a different perspective for shooting photos and video. But, they are also useful for adding light from totally new angles and for lighting inaccessible areas. In his latest short film The Place Where, filmmaker Tim Sessler mounted a 1,600W LED light onto a drone and created a moody masterpiece.

Photographer uses drone mounted strobes to put light in impossible places

Jun 6, 2017 by John Aldred 13 Comments

Sometimes, it’s just impossible to set down a light stand, especially on location. Your stands might not be tall enough to get the light where you want. Perhaps the ground is just completely uneven. There may not even be any ground there at all. These days, though, we have other options.

For Chinese photographer Fuyan Liu, that option was to mount Godox AD200 flashes to DJI Inspire 2 drones. We’ve seen similar before, from both Nikon and Canon. And even Elinchrom. But it’s still been a little out of reach for most photographers. With today’s more capable drones, and powerful lights decreasing in weight, it’s starting to become more of a reality.

This photographer lit a biker doing stunts with an Elinchrom strobe mounted to a drone

Nov 21, 2016 by John Aldred 4 Comments

When Nikon put a couple of SB-5000 speedlights on a drone for their launch of the D500, I was pretty impressed. I was also a little jealous. It was something I’d wanted to try myself, but didn’t have access to the kind of drones I’d need to lift them. Now, photographer David Robinson has upped the stakes by strapping an Elinchrom ELB 400 strobe to an octocopter.

Such a rig has the inherent advantage of being far higher than light stands could ever go. It’s probably the most reliable method of trying to simulate bright daylight with hard edged parallel shadows. Being a drone, it also has the advantage of being able to follow a moving subject. In this case, that moving subject is pro mountain biker Matt Jones.