Arial “panos” – a new market?

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The way I figure it, there’s at least 20 people in those apartment blocks on Point Cartwright (above) who could do with a big, glorious limited edition print of this arial photo.

And I can see a large print hanging in the foyer of the Maroochydore Shire Council building.

Panoramic landscape pics were all the rage about a decade ago (just ask Peter Lik or Ken Duncan). But now every man and his dog has learned to stitch together photos from their i-phone and it’s hard not to be numbed by them all.

But a new frontier has opened up in arial photography with drone technology, and I’m thinking there’s money to be made in producing large, limited edition, panoramic prints shot from the sky.

In the past, arial photography sat in the rarified atmosphere of photographers and their clients who could afford charted planes and helicopters. But, because of the expense involved, flights tended to be short, and there wasn’t a whole lot of creativity in the images.

Drones, of course, have changed all that, with the ability to launch on a whim in ideal conditions and capture striking, high-quality images of familiar and celebrated locations. Add to this opportunity of understanding light and the experience of being able to shoot high-quality landscape images on the ground, and you have the potential to produce big, glorious, panoramic arial prints that are unlikely to have been seen before.

I should add I’m only looking to produce limited edition prints, say 50 of each pic, in this format as there’s little demand for panoramic images in magazines (let alone editors prepared to pay real money for them, he adds). It’s also hard to appreciate them when they appear as low-res “miniatures” at the top of your blog post as they appear here, in social media or as thumbnails in your on-line photo library.

But framed and delivered as large, limited edition prints – well, that’s another story.

………(all I’ve got to do now is keep my drone in the air long enough to capture a few more of them 😉).

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