Maybe you are like me and you just settled into a new place and are looking for places nearby that you can shoot. After moving to a new location about an hour away from where I was living at home, I have been trying to keep up with all my shooting. In a way, I feel like it has gotten a lot more difficult because I need to find places to go, people to work with, and all sorts of other things that interest me to keep shooting and creating new content. There are times where I feel like I am stuck and times where I feel like I've found such a cool spot and I am super happy about it, however I think the biggest key to success is actually going out and lfinding places to continue your work.
Being in a more industrial location, I find it much harder to find places for me to fly and shoot things of interest. There are a lot of factories, warehouses, rivers, and all that good stuff over by where I moved to. Over the summer in North Jersey, I would shoot a lot of lakes and nature and two years before that I lived by the beach and would mostly shoot that. It's funny to think back to when I started and first got my drone. I never had any big plans for shooting or creating new content, but things really started to grow on me when I went to live back home that summer. It was at that moment that I adapted to the change in location and realized that you can make a compelling image just about anywhere. From here on out, I began finding new places to go explore and shoot in order for me to keep up with my work and attempt to better myself at what I love to do.
This has been the toughest transition for me yet, but rather than talk about how I don't live in a good place to shoot, I can make the best of it and challenge myself to find new things to shoot. As a real estate photographer a majority of the time, I have been getting myself more and more into straight lines and symmetry. Since there are so many manmade things around me, I find it interesting to shoot them from the sky and see how perfectly we make things for ourselves. I've always loved showing man's interaction with nature (though I feel like we really destoy it) and photographing cars, boats, trains, water, and so on. With all of this stuff within a 10-mile radius from me, I have been doing my best to go see it all and scout it for other types of shoots if I ever wanted to revisit. Moving to where I am now has really pushed me to pay more attention to my composition and being able to create an interesting photo with little to work with.
Conclusion
If you are new to a certain location or are traveling for a while and settling into a new spot for a bit, you can always find ways to create compelling images. It may be hard at first adapting to the location, finding a place to park and fly from, or even just a place to go shoot at, but if you don't do it, nothing will come. It's amazing to think that over the summer I was out pretty much every day flying and now I am only out a few times a week trying to find new spots to go to when I have the time. I have only been here about three weeks now and am still getting to know the area. The more I explore and check things out, the more spots I will have in mind to shoot. With fall coming in quick and winter coming right after, I definitely need to keep at it with my shooting and find some places that really stand out to me. Whether you are an aerial photographer, portrait photographer, landscape photographer, or so on, finding new locations to shoot is a daunting, yet rewarding task for us and is completely necessary when we are trying to improve our work or even just continuing to push out good content that represents our work. I encourage everybody to explore and push themselves a bit when they feel like they are slacking because there is never a good time to give up.
