With drone technology becoming increasingly more advanced, accessible, and commonplace the burgeoning artistic endeavour of aerial photography has been further legitimated with the announcement of the winners of the fourth annual Drone Aerial Photography Contest.
As with many popular inventions of the 20th and 21st century drones started life as a military project, and over the decades they have evolved in technology, size, uses, and now price. Ok they still aren’t cheap enough that every man, women, and child will be having one just yet, but they are cheap enough for people with a keen interest.
Now a major use for drones over the last few years is to attach cameras to them to capture breathtaking, and previously unobtainable pictures, and with drone technology increasingly becoming a daily fact of life, the burgeoning artistic endeavour of drone aerial photography has been further legitimated with the announcement of the winners of the 2017 Drone Aerial Photography Contest, now in its fourth year.
Created in collaboration between National Geographic and Dronestagram (no we didn’t know that existed either), there were 3 categories that photos could be entered into, with judging performed by a panel of experts, including Deputy Director of Photography at National Geographic, Patrick Witty, National Geographic France Photo Editor Emanuela Ascoli, National Geographic Traveler Photo Editor Jeff Heimsath and members of the Dronestagram team who picked three winning entries (one from each category) from 8000 submissions, as well as two runners up (although these are called 2nd winner and 3rd winner) based on creativity and photographic quality.
The Nature Category winner was: Provence, summer trim by jcurtial. ^^^
The People Category winner was: End of the line by Martin Sanchez. ^^^
The Urban Category winner was: Concrete Jungle by bachirm. ^^^
Take a look below at some of the other stunning winning airborne photographs, and be sure to head on over to dronestagram to view lots more of the entries, as well as a special category called Creativity.
