By NOEL MURPHY
DRONES, increasingly popular with photographers, are finding new applications among everyone from real estate agents to the mining sector – not to mention defence forces.
With a cost of around $2000 to get set up, they’re within ready striking range of the general public. Their implications with regard to privacy and other laws, however, have yet to be tested.
Notwithstanding, some upper-end hotels have already started offering poolside drone drink services while mail deliveries and other drone services are on the drawing board. Pizzas maybe?
Surf Coast photographer Ed Sloane is one bloke who’s taken on board the new angles offered by drone-cameras.
Together with Ashley Bent, both of them from Grovedale business CineFly, he’s looking to different applications drones offer – engineering, cinematography, surveying and more.
Originally an environmental scientist working as a hydrographer in the Otway, Bellarine, Barwon and Corangamite catchments, he can see the value of aerial photography to inform land management along the coast.
“There are so many applications,” Sloane told the Independent.
“We’re not looking just at images but at potential surveying applications, there’s a lot stuff you can do — stocktakes for mines and the likes.
“Our focus is on surveying and engineering but also cinematography – you can get much better angles than helicopters and drones are cheaper too.”
Sloane and the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority will be hosting an awareness raising Estuaries Unmasked seminar at the Aireys pub on 9 October from 6.30pm.
Catchment Ecology Services’ Stephen Harfield will be on hand with details about the Painkalac Creek gathered by estuary watchers over the past seven years. Inquiries to 5232 9100.
Drones offer spatial information to complement data collected by the estuary watchers and offer the potential to move vital environmental research up a notch.
Another thing yet to be tested with drones, and presumably a fair challenge, is just what birds – known to be ferociously territorial to a fault – might think of their new featherless friends.
Stay tuned.
