THE WORLD LOOKS BETTER FROM UP HERE

There is a moment in almost every drone flight that still gets me.

I can be standing somewhere I have visited a dozen times. A road, a field, a coastline, a village, a harbour, a patch of countryside that looks perfectly ordinary at eye level.

Then the drone climbs.

Twenty metres. Fifty. A little turn of the gimbal.

And suddenly the place becomes something completely different.

That is the bit I love.

Welcome to NIX from above.

I NEVER REALLY WANTED JUST A FLYING CAMERA

I have always liked technology, cameras and things with buttons that absolutely demand to be pressed.

Drones conveniently combine all three.

But somewhere along the line it stopped being about simply owning a clever bit of flying technology.

It became photography.

Proper photography.

Composition. Light. Shadows. Weather. Timing. Geometry. Colour. Perspective.

Except my tripod can now fly several hundred feet into the air.

THE VIEW THAT DOESN'T EXIST

The wonderful thing about aerial photography is that many of these photographs are views that effectively do not exist until the drone creates them.

You cannot stand where the camera is.

There is no footpath. No viewing platform. No conveniently positioned hill.

For a few minutes I can put a camera exactly where I want it in three-dimensional space and start looking for the photograph.

Move left. Climb ten metres. Rotate slightly. Drop the gimbal. Wait for the light.

Click.

There it is.

MY LITTLE AIR FORCE

Over the years the NIX drone hangar has become a collection of machines with very different personalities.

Nemesis, my DJI Mavic 2 Pro, is still the old heavyweight. A proper camera drone from the era when folding arms, Hasselblad branding and a chunky flight case made the whole business feel pleasingly serious.

Then there is Zoom, the DJI Mini 4 Pro.

This is the drone that demonstrates just how absurdly far the technology has moved. Tiny enough to disappear into a bag, yet capable of producing photographs and video that would once have required far more equipment and considerably more faffing.

I have also got Sneaker, my DJI Neo 2, and Twitch, my DJI Spark.

Different generations. Different sizes. Different jobs.

All of them share one important characteristic.

They make me want to go outside.

THE DRONE ISN'T THE ADVENTURE

This is probably the biggest thing I've learned.

The drone itself isn't really the adventure.

It is the excuse.

It gets me out in Vanilla.

It gets me onto the coast, into the countryside, across fields and up hills.

Sometimes Torque comes along as well and suddenly I've got a campervan, an e-MTB, a drone and several cameras with me.

At that point I am approximately one espresso machine away from becoming my own outside-broadcast unit.

WHY I STILL LOVE STILLS

Video gets most of the attention with modern drones.

And I understand why.

A slow cinematic flight across a landscape can look magnificent.

But I still have a particular love for a single photograph.

A photograph makes you choose.

One frame. One instant. One composition.

Get it right and everything unnecessary disappears.

That is especially powerful from the air because landscapes become almost graphic.

Roads become lines. Fields become blocks of colour. Buildings become shapes. Shadows suddenly matter.

It is photography with the world temporarily turned into a map.

PHOTOGRAPH FIRST. DRONE SECOND.

For me this has become the rule.

I don't want somebody to look at one of my pictures and merely think, that's a good drone shot.

I want them to think, that's a good photograph.

The fact the camera happened to be flying should almost be secondary.

The technology gets the camera there.

The photograph still has to be found.

THE BEST BIT STILL HAPPENS BEFORE I PRESS THE BUTTON

For all the clever technology involved, my favourite part remains remarkably simple.

I launch.

The drone rises.

The familiar world starts changing underneath it.

Then I slowly rotate the aircraft and look around.

Not flying anywhere in particular.

Just looking.

Searching.

And every now and again something appears on the screen that I hadn't seen from the ground at all.

That's the photograph.

That's why I keep doing it.

NIX // SKY

My Flickr archive is gradually becoming something more than a collection of photographs.

It is a record of places I've been, journeys I've made, weather I've chased and moments when I decided it was worth stopping Vanilla and putting something into the sky.

Some flights produce twenty photographs.

Some produce one.

Some produce absolutely nothing worth keeping.

That's photography.

But every once in a while I get one that makes me sit back afterwards and think:

Yep.

That's why I carried a drone.

SKY // NIXDRONES // JOHN NICKOLLS