The ArtOfPhotography website features photography from some of the top artists in the world. On the website’s home page it states, ” Through the experience of art, the powers of perception, observation, and reality can be awakened in both the ones who create directly and the ones who perceive indirectly.” Drones have changed the way photographers can capture images. Through a drone’s bird’s eye point of view, photographers can represent the world in vast new ways. Drone photography has become highly competitive in the last few years. In 2019, a project manager living in Sydney, Australia became fascinated with the images he was seeing from drones and decided to give it a go himself.

Born in 1992, Brad Walls has always been intrigued by the images photographers create with lines, scale, and shadow. He knew that if he wanted his work to stand out in the saturated world of drone photography, he would need to take a different approach. As his bio explains, “Brad’s niche style removes itself from traditional Aerial Photography and focuses on experimentation with negative space, symmetry and leading lines.” While many aerial photographers use drones to capture sweeping landscape portraits, Brad uses his drone to capture images directly below the camera. This top-down, cropped style of photography creates a unique visual perspective.

While drone photography has become best known for freezing live, unrehearsed moments in time, Brad carefully constructs each image he captures with his drone. Some of his most acclaimed work features carefully posed ballerinas, synchronized swimmers, and swimming pools. For example, in his series titled Ballerine de l’air, Brad had his ballerina models hold a traditional pose, but it is the positioning of the camera that completely changes the image. When taken from above with the drone, a shadow perfectly to scale with the dancer is revealed, evoking a sense of symmetry. “Most people had seen ballet photographed traditionally and while those photos are undeniably beautiful,” Brad said, “I wanted to rewrite the composition, purely focusing on the unique shapes and shadows of the art form.”

Another of Brad’s self proclaimed obsessions is the symmetry found in geometric shapes. He brilliantly contrasts the perfect symmetry of shapes like rhombuses, circles, and triangles against the fluidity of water in his series titled Water Geomaids. In these images, synchronized swimmers hold poses in the water while Brad positions the drone directly above them. The results are minimalistic geometric shapes softened by the grace of the swimmers and the reflective ripples in the water. Brad was inspired to create this series after first doing a series on swimming pools, one of his favorite things to photograph.

Brad loves how you can find beautiful swimming pools all over the world. When he sends his drone up over it, the image he captures and perfectly crops can transport a viewer there instantly. No matter where you are in the world, you can easily imagine that you are sitting next to a pristine pool with the top-down drone images of the pools Brad takes. For Brad, he feels that most drone photography is not focused on fine art images, something he hopes to change. “I’m really trying to explore different perspectives that are unseen by our eye,” Brad said while pushing what he calls “the artistic expression of drone work.” In the few short years that Brad has worked as an aerial photographer, he has won multiple awards. These awards are from aerial photography and traditional photography competitions, proving that Brad’s vision of refining the art of drone photography is becoming a reality.

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