In a different light

I have been actively flying drones since 2013, time at which if you wanted to fly, you had to solder many of the components together and DIY your way into a fully functioning drone since buying the whole thing out of a shelf wasn’t possible the way it is now. Attaching a camera on a drone and figuring out a semi-reliable video transmission presented first challenge I enjoyed tackling. I was always trying to push what’s possible and finding different approaches to using quadcopters in photography work which lead me to the idea of using a drone as a light source (instead of a flying camera tripod). I eventually conducted the first tests in the year 2016.

Using the drone as a light source dramatically transforms the scene especially in the context of sports photography. Being able to follow a moving subject, over a complicated terrain or body of water let’s you work with light and photography in a way that simply wasn’t possible before (but also would have been much easier today). This approach offers new, fresh perspective and lets you do something new in a discipline where everything was already done before.

After conducting first tests of the lighting method, I partnered up with Hasselblad and RedBull, which enabled me to bring this project to life. I felt the combination of art, sport and cutting edge technical solution was something very fitting for the RedBull brand and I have been grateful to find a partner in them for this series.

Over the span more than a year I photographed 11 of RedBull athletes, some of the best in their disciplines. All of the athletes have many sports they do in order to relax, other than the ones they are famous for. We asked them to share those sports with us as well as their favourite places to practice those sports.

We traveled all across the Czech Republic documenting famous athletes doing something they are not famous for. All lit using a flash attached onto a drone.

Photographing the fencer Alexander Choupenitch playing ping-pong at his local gym, mountain bike legend Michal Maroši jumping on a snowboard over a river stream, or olympic gold snowboarder Eva Samková riding her horse on a farm near Prague.

Making the images required us to overcome series of challenges staring with figuring out a safe way of mounting and triggering the flash. Operating the drone has also been very challenging especially in a cold weather where the batteries lasted only about three minutes at a time. In combination with unreliable flash transmission (signal from the drone radio almost always overpowered the flash remote signals) we oftentimes got only one working frame out of 20 shots. Just the first photo of Martin Fuksa skiing on a frozen lake took us almost two hours to complete.

I tried to approach every athlete with a different, visually appealing concept, that goes beyond the “drone effect”. I was very particular about not using the drone light effect as something gimmicky that would quickly wear off. Every action shot is also paired with a traditional portrait of the athlete resulting in two parallel series.

The images were published as the main story on the Czech RedBull website and were used across various social media. My wish was to also present the images in offline space so we organised a physical exhibition at the Point Gallery in the center of Prague where I presented all of the images printed on high quality Canon paper and on a big custom lightbox.

The project also got published in the printed Guardian Weekly magazine and on their website.