Abstract drone photography around Gap Springs

With a recently acquired drone I wondered whether aerial landscapes might lend themselves to abstract techniques. A visit to the colorful eroded hills in a remote part of Nevada around Gap Spring made for a good opportunity to explore this idea.  We camped for a night in a secluded canyon by the spring, so I was able to fly and photograph both around sunset and sunrise as well as in full daylight.  Drone photography is still a learning experience for me, so I was happy to be able to capture images under different lighting conditions and see what worked best after the fact. Also, because I found it difficult to judge compositions on the screen of the remote control, I took many shots at different viewpoints and angles, with the camera variously horizontal, angled down and pointed directly down.

Viewing the images on the computer screen after we got home, the ones that looked most promising were when the camera was pointing straight down. These shots obviously excluded the sky, and flattening ridgelines and vertical features that would otherwise give a viewer clues as to what they were looking at. Instead, the images appeared simply as abstract patterns, an effect that I accentuated in some cases by cropping and aligning to remove distracting features. The hues in the landscape were relatively muted, but since my aim was to create abstract images I felt under no constraint to represent reality, and made free use of Photoshop sliders (dehaze, clarity, saturation, etc.) to accentuate rich palettes of reds, oranges, purples and blues that were already present, but hidden, within the RAW image file. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the tiny camera in my Mavic 4 mini drone, and with brightly lit scenes the image files withstood some heavy post-processing without detriment.

The photos here illustrate the striking variety of badlands topography and coloration I found within a 30 minute walking distance of our campsite.