First, Get Their Attention
I used this 360-degree panorama captured with a DJI Mini 3 Pro to illustrate a story about crime in Westerville.
The panorama was the primary photo because it stands out from the visuals typically used to accompany a news story. The story is important, but as it was in the days of print and now in the era of “seen before the first scroll,” this is a distinctive photo drawing immediate interest through its distorted yet familiar details.
One job of a news photographer is to make you want to read the story. Creating a unique photo accomplishes that task. This view of the crime scene does just that.
The drone’s software offers several panorama settings, including this one, which automatically creates a single image from a series of photos taken as the drone rotates around its hovering point. The resulting frames are stitched together to form this composite view.
When viewed in panorama software, the image allows you to look around as if you were hovering in that spot.
Usually, a complete 360-degree panorama isn’t as visually compelling. Here, though, Park Street appears as a curved ribbon stretching from State Street at the far right to the woods along Alum Creek on the far left. The repeating pattern of the bricks is distorted but still recognizable.
The yellow and green house directly behind the drone is split in half, with matching sections at the edges of the frame.
One of my other photos was a typical aerial shot showing the home’s proximity to Uptown, which helped illustrate its location in familiar surroundings. I also captured street-level photos, but they resembled real estate listings and lacked impact.
The photos were made in auto mode on a DJI Mini 3 Pro, saved as RAW files, and edited in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.
