This Guy Uses A Drone As Lighting To Take Mesmerizing Shots In The Desert

Drones are perfect to capture aerial views, engage in friendly races with the colleagues or even to build a hybrid helicopter that can lift a man off the ground.  But it never occured to us that a drone can be used in photography. There’s where the real magic happens, says artist Reuben Wu, after coming up with an innovative photo technique.

Wu’s idea came one year ago. He was trying to photograph a car at night and didn’t have enough light so he attached an LED strip to a drone. Besides getting the job done, Reuben was mesmerized by the effect it had on the image, the way the light embraced his subject. So he began a series by using the same light technique – LED+ drone.

“Using the GPS-enabled aerial light/drones in specific positions in space, I am able to produce moods of drama and tension through use of chiaroscuro, and the ability to illuminate isolated features of a scene and exclude unwanted elements.”

Remote land survey: to get an idea of how vast this place is, check out the photos in the location link.

A photo posted by Reuben Wu (@itsreuben) on Apr 10, 2016 at 11:15am PDT

The results are breathtaking; mysterious landscape from deserted places that you can’t quite put your finger on. They seem colossal and almost not from this Earth.

Proud to show a new image from my latest project. Lux Noctis is a photo series depicting places of natural beauty within the framework of traditional landscape photography but influenced by ideas of planetary exploration, 19th century sublime romantic painting, and science fiction. We are overwhelmed everyday by beautiful images of the familiar. I imagine these scenes transformed into undiscovered landscapes which renew our perceptions of our world. These are abstractions of the landscape photograph, or ‘portraits of the landscape’, drawing the attention of the viewer only to the illuminated, in an otherwise overwhelming and vast picture.

A photo posted by Reuben Wu (@itsreuben) on Apr 8, 2016 at 6:55am PDT

To make his project a reality, Reuben Wu shoots with a Phase One XF 100MP and a Leica M-P 240 and gets lighting from a Fiilex AL250 and a 3DR Solo drone. Each image is a composite, since he has to lit parts of it separately, using different exposure to get the effect desired. #fotomagic

The whole series is called Lux Noctis and it depicts “places of natural beauty within the framework of traditional landscape photography, influenced by 19th century sublime romantic painting, planetary exploration, and science fiction.”

source: Wired.com