We have drones, you have questions.

At Do Good Media, we get questions about drones and drone photography, drone videography. Some of the questions we get there are things like …

“Can’t you just fly that drone in my house?”

Uh, no. Number one, no. We’re not going to fly a drone inside your house because we don’t want to chop your face off.

“Why can’t I just hire my neighbor? He has a drone.”

Okay, so you want to use your neighbor who has a drone. Legally, if you’re going to be doing drone photography and you’re going to be selling that product, and you’re doing it professionally for a business, you have to have a license. Do Good Media has two licensed drone operators, so if you hire us you know that we’re legit. We also insure our drones so that if it falls down on your property, you don’t have to worry about it, we’re covered.

Another question we get, not usually from business owners but from individuals who see us flying drones are questions like …

Q: “How much did that cost?”

A: About $1,500 – $10,000, depending on which one we’re flying.

Q: “Are you flying a drone?”

A: …yes. Generally this is also asked when our heads are pointed towards the sky, while holding a controller, and a drone is flying overhead.

Q: “Are you spying on people?”

A: No. Not usually. Or ever. That’s creepy.

Q: “You work for the government?”

A: Not exclusively, but if they happen to hire us, I guess so. Still not spying though.

Q: “How high can you fly that thing?”

A: This is one of those questions where we have to start with “Legally speaking…”. Legally speaking, no higher than 400 feet above ground level. In other countries, however… https://youtu.be/eclCuW63dYU

Q: “You ever crash that thing?”

A: We’ve had some close calls, and one time a tree decided to talk right in front of Steven’s drone in the forest, but we don’t talk about that one.

Q: “My cousin Bobby got a drone last week, it crashed.”

A: Although this isn’t a question, we still get this often. Happens to the best of us, Bobby.

Okay, so we get a lot of comments. When people see us flying drones they come up to us and ask us a lot of questions. Sometimes they’re not questions, they just talk to us and that’s fine, I appreciate it. It’s still  a new-ish piece of tech. People are still kind of shocked when they see or hear it. Some of the main concerns we get are things about privacy, what the capabilities of the drone and how far can it fly, how fast can it fly, how high can it fly, things like that, and I just wanted to answer a couple of those questions here because people are really curious.

Some people ask us why our footage looks different than their footage when they have a drone and they’ve shot video as well, and a big part of it is just getting comfortable with the drone, but we’re also licensed pilots with the FAA. We’ve gone through training and we’ve actually proven that we understand airspace and we won’t do things that are stupid and reckless and won’t endanger people around us. It makes sense because some people will ask the question …

“Are those dangerous?”

And they can be! Basically you have these super fast blades spinning around and it could literally chop your face off. We don’t want that to happen. As a business, it would not make a lot of sense for us to do reckless things, dangerous things, around people who are paying us to shoot video. That’s stupid, so we’re very careful when we shoot stills and videos with the drone while flying it for a commercial project. There’s different rules for where you are so depending on where the shoot needs to happen, there are different protocols for who we need to notify, when we need to notify them, what kind of permission we need to get. There’s a lot of things to that, and we take all that into account. We don’t just throw a drone up in the air, get our shots, and leave. That’s kind of guerrilla style and it’s unprofessional.

So if you have a friend who has offered to take some photos for you with their new drone they got for Christmas, just be careful. If you’re doing this for a business, just understand you have a lot of liability there. If a drone drops down and hits somebody, it’s not necessarily going to be on the operator, it may be the person who you’re shooting for, so as a business owner it makes a lot of sense to hire someone who’s professional, who has a license, who has insurance on their drone, so you’re not going to be on the hook if something bad happens.

So depending on what you’re looking to accomplish, just understand that sometimes it’s important and worthwhile to hire a professional. They’re taking into account a lot of considerations that an amateur or just a hobbyist would not consider. Here at Do Good Media, we have two licensed pilots, and we have a combined hundreds and hundreds of hours of flight time. So if you’re looking for someone who’s professional, someone who’s reliable, someone who may not be the cheapest, but you’re going to get a great value, great quality product at the end of the day, you should call Do Good Media for all of your drone photography and video needs.