LA in 4K
Most city aerials could be any city — a grid, some towers, a horizon line. This one is downtown Los Angeles with the arena's roof in the near ground, at the hour the sun sits behind the skyline instead of over it.
- Collection
- Drone · 02 works
- Frames
- 01
- Format
- Still
Into the sun, not away from it
Fly the other way and downtown is evenly lit, legible and flat. Facing the sun costs the shadow detail and buys what makes the frame read as depth — haze between the ridgelines, a rim on the glass, towers separating from each other instead of stacking into one silhouette. The light that does it runs on the day's schedule, not the crew's.
Anyone can license a Los Angeles skyline
Which is the argument for flying one. A licensed frame turns up having already been in other people's decks, it carries a use term someone has to read, and it cannot be asked for a different height or a different hour. Flying it costs a window in the air, and what comes back answers to the brief.
Without a landmark it is any downtown
Towers photograph as towers. What fixes a skyline to a city is one object the reader already carries a memory of, close enough to the camera to be unmistakable — here the arena, sitting under the financial district with the freeway running out to the left. Take that out of the frame and the picture is accurate about nothing.
Frame 01 / 01
- Source
- 2496 × 1396