3 Tips for Drone Surf Photography

I have been flying drones over Sydney's Eastern Suburbs and Byron Bay for years. Most of what I learned came from getting it wrong first.

These are three things that actually changed the way I shoot.

Forget golden hour. Learn the tide.

Everyone says shoot at golden hour. The light is better, yes. But at Bronte or Tamarama, if the tide is wrong, the colour of the water is flat and the wave shape is ordinary regardless of how good the light is. I now check the tide chart before I check the weather. A mid-morning low tide at Bronte in summer will give you shallower water over the reef, stronger turquoise, and more defined wave structure. That combination matters more than the hour.

Golden hour with a bad tide produces a mediocre image with warm tones. A mid-morning low tide with clean conditions produces something worth printing.

The surfer is not the subject. The wave is.

When I started shooting surf from a drone, I kept trying to frame the surfer. Centred, mid-turn, board visible. That instinct comes from watching ground-level surf photography. From above, it produces stiff, predictable images.

The shots that work are the ones where the surfer is a mark on a larger surface. A small dark shape in the bottom corner of a frame full of white water. Or a single figure on the shoulder of a wave that takes up most of the image. The scale relationship between the person and the ocean is what the aerial perspective gives you. Use it.

Altitude changes everything, and lower is not always better.

Flying lower gives you more detail in the water texture. Flying higher gives you more context, the shape of the break, the lineup, the surrounding geography. Neither is correct. They are different images.

The mistake I made early on was always flying at the same height out of habit. Now I will shoot the same break at four or five different altitudes in the same session. The image I keep is rarely the one I expected when I launched the drone. At The Pass in Byron, my favourite shots have come from much higher than I thought I needed to be. The full arc of the bay only becomes clear once you are high enough to see it.