Photography and Drones: Trawling for Light Rays

Photography and Drones - Trawling for Light Rays

Source: TrawlingForLightRays.md

Introduction

Drone photography from the Olympic Peninsula has changed the way I see the world — and I believe it can change the way you see it too. Vision is the dominant sense through which humans perceive and interact with their surroundings, and photography has always been our most powerful tool for sharing that perception. Before digital cameras, this relationship was bound by the cost and mechanics of film. With digital cameras, it exploded into a daily habit for millions of people worldwide. The internet article How Many Photos? [1] puts this into perspective for me.

In the year 2024, every 13 days the world takes as many photos as were taken globally in 1998 at the peak of film photography.

That's a lot of people taking photos, and that includes me. Initially, like almost everyone else, my smartphone became my primary camera. Unlike film, which required processing to see the photographs, digital versions appear instantly and your device stores them by default. That is a massive improvement over working with film, something that was largely reserved for vacations in my case.

This article is the story of how a software developer, a science fiction obsession, and a search for light rays converged into a serious passion for drone photography — and why the landscapes I have found myself in, from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Plains, have each shaped that passion in ways I could not have predicted.

Timeline

My path to drone photography was anything but direct, but in hindsight every step was pointing toward it.

Smartphones hit the market in 2007 [2], and after watching the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) online I decided I would become a mobile developer for Apple's iPhone. That single decision set me on a course that would eventually shape how I think about images, data, and the technology behind capturing the world around us.

After a couple of years as a mobile developer, I was fortunate to work for Cox Automotive, where I began writing code to manage digital media files on iPhone devices. Later, I worked on a VIN [3] scanner for multiple mobile applications. Through this work, I learned extensively about managing and distributing digital images, improved the performance and memory usage of the scanner, and packaged the code into a reusable framework for distribution within Cox Automotive. Without realising it at the time, I was building the technical foundation I would later bring to photography.

The next pivotal step was enrolling in the Computational Photography course at Georgia Tech (CS 6475) [4]. Challenging and deeply rewarding, it taught me the fundamentals of the computational photography pipeline — from illumination, through the optics that focus the image, to the sensor that collects it, and finally to the processing that prepares the image for display. It was here that I was first exposed to panoramic photography. Software stitches multiple overlapping images taken from the same location to form a single expansive image, and to understand how that works you need to understand the 3D array — the data structure that underpins every digital image. For the course we used Python, and it was my first hands-on introduction to NumPy [5]. I found enormous enjoyment in building and exploring panoramas, and that enthusiasm has never left me.

The final piece of the puzzle came from an unexpected place: science fiction. The word drone had carried a powerful resonance for me since childhood, when I first read the works of Iain M. Banks [6]. In The Culture [7], drones are fully sentient members of a post-scarcity [8] civilisation — curious, independent, and intimately connected to the world around them. When I finally purchased my first drone (a Mavic Pro 2), it felt like more than a camera upgrade. It felt like stepping into a story I had been reading for decades.

I joined the AMA [9], found a local model airfield to train at, studied the official FAA documentation, and in 2022 passed the FAA Remote Pilot certification exam (Part 107). The technical background, the love of panoramas, and the childhood dream had finally come together. All that remained was finding the right landscape — and as it turned out, I would find not one but two.

Location

For photographers, location is paramount, as it determines many aspects of what is possible on an assignment. With drone photography, there are also legal requirements for flying that must be considered as part of the planning process. For example, do you plan to fly over people? Simply put, your location dictates what you can do with your drone. I have now photographed seriously in two very different locations, and each has fundamentally changed what I look for and how I shoot.

The Olympic Peninsula, Washington State

The Olympic Peninsula in Washington State is, for drone photography, close to ideal. It is a place of dramatic contrasts — the jagged snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains give way to old-growth temperate rainforest, which in turn opens onto miles of wild, largely undeveloped Pacific coastline. The Hood Canal traces its long narrow finger along the eastern edge of the Peninsula, offering reflections and waterline perspectives that are genuinely unlike anywhere else I have photographed. Weather on the Peninsula is dynamic and often theatrical: morning fog pools in the river valleys, cloud layers stack against the mountain ridgelines, and on the right morning the light does not so much rise as erupt through every gap it can find.

For a drone pilot, this variety is a gift. Sparsely populated areas mean fewer restrictions on where you can fly. The terrain rewards altitude — getting even 200 ft above the treeline on a ridge reveals layers of landscape that are completely invisible from the ground. I have flown above river estuaries where the tidal channels form abstract patterns in the mud, over coastal bluffs where the forest ends abruptly at the cliff edge, and across valley floors so wide that no single ground-level photograph could begin to contain them. I enjoy hiking and being outdoors in general, and drone photography became a natural and deeply satisfying extension of those activities.

Kansas — Learning to Chase the Sky

Moving to Kansas reframed everything. After years of shooting in a landscape defined by verticality — mountains, ridgelines, forest canopy, cliff edges — I suddenly found myself somewhere almost entirely horizontal. Kansas is flat in a way that takes some adjustment, and I will admit that my first instinct was to wonder what, exactly, there was here to photograph.

The answer turned out to be everything above the horizon.

Kansas has one of the most dramatic and photogenic skies I have ever encountered. The state sits at the convergence of cold dry air from the Rockies, warm moist air pushing up from the Gulf of Mexico, and the wide open geography that gives weather systems room to build and perform without interruption. The result is a sky that is rarely boring and frequently spectacular. Sunrise and sunset in Kansas are not the brief, polite affairs they can be in mountainous terrain where the sun disappears behind a ridgeline. Here, the sky is the landscape. The light has nothing to hide behind and nowhere to go except everywhere — spreading across the horizon in both directions for as far as the eye can see.

This shift in environment has had a profound effect on my photography. On the Olympic Peninsula, I was trawling for light rays in the valleys and the mist. In Kansas, the light ray is the sky. Crepuscular rays fan out from behind towering cumulus clouds in the late afternoon. Sunrise ignites the underbellies of storm systems moving east overnight. The golden hour is not an hour — on a flat horizon with unobstructed sightlines, it stretches and lingers in a way that gives a photographer genuine time to work with.

The drone has found a new purpose here too. Without terrain to reveal, altitude in Kansas is about relationship — the relationship between the land and the sky above it. At 300 ft, the patchwork of wheat fields and dirt roads becomes a geometric canvas, and the sky pressing down on it from above becomes the subject rather than the backdrop. I have shot panoramas here that are almost entirely sky, with just a thin strip of earth at the bottom to anchor them, and they are some of the most striking images I have made.

Kansas taught me that the absence of drama in the landscape does not mean the absence of drama in the photograph. You simply have to look up.

Landscapes

I have come to the conclusion that panoramic photos are an extension of the landscape format (2:1), with two major distinctions. First, the panorama has a significantly wider field of view than a standard landscape photo. Second, the panorama will be much larger in file size, given that it is a collection of photos stitched together.

The panorama shown above was built from 12 individual photos, assembled in 2 rows of 6 — the first row captured from left to right, the second from right to left. I shot it on a still evening when the light was coming in low and flat from the west, which is exactly the kind of light that rewards a wide frame. A single photo would have forced a choice: include the sky and lose the foreground detail, or compress the scene into something that no longer feels like the place itself. The panorama removes that compromise entirely. What you see is close to what I saw — the full sweep of it, with the detail intact. To capture the same scene in a single shot would require shooting from so far away that all meaningful detail would be lost.

New Devices, New Imagery

A drone's camera offers a view of the terrain that is simply not available to humans without considerable effort, if it is even possible at all. Without an FAA waiver, and excluding AMA sites, most drones operate within a maximum altitude of 400 ft. I believe this puts drones in a truly special place — literally. Most low-flying aircraft activity occurs at or above 500 ft, excluding military operations, takeoffs, landings, and helicopters. Drones work and operate in the sub-400 ft space. Nearly all other aircraft simply pass through that altitude while ascending or descending. Flying a number of drone models has left me with the distinct impression that drones fly more like insects than anything else I can think of.

At 400 ft above the Peninsula, the world reorganises itself. The trail you hiked to reach your launch point disappears into the canopy below. The river you crossed on a footbridge becomes a ribbon of silver threading through the trees. A ridgeline that felt imposing from the ground becomes a single brushstroke in a landscape that now stretches, on a clear day, from the peaks of the Olympics to the shimmer of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There is an intimacy to flying low and slow — hovering at 150 ft above an estuary, watching the tide move through the channels below — that I did not expect when I first took the controls. The drone does not just give you height. It gives you stillness in places you could never stand, and patience the terrain would never otherwise allow.

The drone's ability to hover and gain altitude relative to a human gives the drone pilot access to hundreds or even thousands of new images. What surprises me still, after flying regularly for several years, is how rarely I return from a location without an image I could not have anticipated before launch.

Trawling for Light Rays

The title of this article needs an explanation — and that explanation is the closest thing to a philosophy I have developed as a photographer.

A light ray, in photographic terms, is what happens when sunlight is made visible by something in its path. Dust, mist, fog, smoke, or water droplets in the air scatter the light and reveal the beam itself — what photographers sometimes call crepuscular rays, or more simply, God rays. They are most common in the hour around sunrise and sunset, when the sun is low and its light is travelling at an angle through the maximum depth of atmosphere. On the Olympic Peninsula, where marine air pushes moisture inland and morning fog is routine in the valleys, the conditions for light rays exist with remarkable frequency. In Kansas, the scale changes entirely — crepuscular rays fan out from behind towering storm clouds across a horizon so wide that a single ray can appear to illuminate an entire county.

But frequency does not mean predictability. A light ray requires the right combination of moisture in the air, a gap in the cloud or terrain for the sun to push through, and a dark background to make the beam visible. You can study the forecast, check the dawn times, choose your location carefully — and still arrive to find flat overcast and nothing to shoot. Or you can drive to a ridge on a morning that looks unremarkable on paper, and find the valley below you filled with mist and a single shaft of light cutting through the trees at an angle that will exist for perhaps four minutes before the sun rises too high and the moment is gone. Or you can pull over on a Kansas back road at sunset and watch the sky turn a colour that has no name, with light pouring through a gap in the clouds in five directions at once.

That is the trawl. You drag your net through the mornings and the locations and the conditions, and most days you pull it up mostly empty. But sometimes the light does something extraordinary, and you are there with a drone at altitude and a camera pointing the right direction, and you get it. Those are the images I am chasing. That is what this is all about.

Conclusion

From the fog-filled valleys of the Olympic Peninsula to the vast open skies of Kansas, the search for light has taken me to two landscapes that could hardly be more different — and both have given me more than I expected. I continue to learn new concepts such as topographic prominence [10] and the differences between civil dawn, nautical dawn, and astronomical dawn [11][12]. I have come to realise there are hundreds of thousands of opportunities to capture light every single day. You won't get all of them, but you can choose the ones that matter to you. 😉

What I want most is for you to see what I see. The Olympic Peninsula at civil dawn, mist sitting in the valleys, light breaking over a ridgeline. A Kansas sunset spreading colour across a horizon wide enough to swallow everything. These are not scenes that can be fully described in words. They have to be seen. I invite you to browse the drone photography linked throughout this site and let the landscapes speak for themselves. If even one image stops you mid-scroll and makes you look twice, then this article — and every cold early morning spent waiting for the light — was worth it.

Writing about subjects that matter to me helps solidify my ideas and thoughts. I struggled for months before finally sitting down to write this one, and in wrestling with it I realised the thing I needed to do most was simply this: share my photography.

The journey continues.