Excellent Drones

Kenneth Jarecke
3 min readNov 23, 2022

You must have an expensive drone, it makes excellent pictures.

I-94 near nightfall. Kenneth Jarecke / Contact Press Images

You get one chance to make an impact on your viewer. Sometimes this doesn’t matter. Other times, like in the aftermath of a natural disaster, it’s crucial.

People react to the suffering of others, but only if they feel that suffering. Overhead shots from your drone of a flooded coastline, overflowing riverbanks, impassable roads are good to set the scene, but after that, as a photographer, you need to get your feet wet.

If you don’t put a human face on it, people donate less, they don’t volunteer, they don’t engage. You get one chance before the news cycle moves along to make touching images of real people who are hurting. The kind of images that create empathy in the viewer… which moves them to help. The kind of pictures that people won’t forget.

Seen any of those lately?

As a photographer, if you’re not there to do this, you’re taking up space, valuable resources and creating added strain to an infrastructure that’s already overwhelmed. Meanwhile you’re giving nothing in return.

Put the joystick down, pickup your cameras and get muddy. You’d be surprised at how much you can contribute. What you’ll discover. What you’ll see.

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Kenneth Jarecke

I'm a husband, dad, photographer, a writer (sort of), an occasional rancher and the Founder of The Curious Society. https://www.curious-society.org