Drones: some notes, thoughts, observations, uses

The land is quite flat, so one can see very little from the ground, but a drone allows you to place a camera exactly where you want it.

It was a fairly calm day; the turbines were hardly moving.

Irrigation channels near Hay

The Hay Plain would have to be one of the flattest and extensive plains that I know of. The observer/photographer on the ground is very limited in what he can see and photograph.

The losses due to evaporation and soakage from these very long channels must be enormous; the losses due to the inefficient flood-irrigation used at the ends of the channels would probably be even greater.

In late 2016 the (Liberal-National Coalition) Federal government was intending to increase the amount of water that can legally be taken from the Murray-Darling river system and reduce the amount reserved for the environment.

Perhaps if the huge waste in the current irrigation practices, such as to be seen here, was cut out, we would have enough water for both irrigators and environment?

Click on (or touch) the image to see it in more detail.

A travelling irrigator west of Hay

It was on the previous trip that I took the photos above. I thought that the water in the irrigation chanels would have been used for flood irrigation, which is a very inefficient way of using water to grow plants.

This drone photo shows a more efficient method. The machine in the foreground pumps water from the ditch through the pipeline and out through sprinklers; it slowly moves along the channel, watering as it goes.

I didn't know that the travelling irrigator followed an irrigation channel until I flew my drone.

Click (or tap) on the image to view full size; use back-arrow to come back.

Shortly after I flew my drone a woman came and told me that it was illegal to use a drone in a conservation park. I asked her what the justification for this was and she replied that it was to protect Aboriginal sacred sites, which might be visible from a drone while not from the places where walkers go.

The great advantage to photography that a drone gives in The Breakaways is that it can get above the level of the ridge-tops, there is no other way of doing so.

On 2016/09/19 I emailed the Department of Environment asking about this prohibition. I received a reply on 2016/09/28. The reason the writer gave was:

The use of drones in parks is regulated to protect our native fauna, as well as the community. Flying a drone in a park can present a nuisance because of the impact on the privacy and enjoyment of visitors, but they can also disturb nesting birds such as osprey and other raptors. If these birds are disturbed, they many not return to their nests, resulting in the death of their chicks.

Permission to use a drone in a park may be given as part of an application to undertake an activity such [as] commercial photography or scientific research.

Since writing this I have been contacted by someone who told me he had been told to stop using his drone at Kings Canyon National Park. The same justification about Aboriginal sacred sites was given. He said that this was absurd because helecopter flights over the canyon were frequent and they would be looking at the same sites.

Of course there are no ospreys in Australia's inland conservation parks. If drones can frighten raptors off their nests, can aeroplanes and helicopters do the same?

Advantage of drone photography in this sort of area

The photos that were taken with my drone would have been impossible to get any other way, short of hiring a helicopter. I believe that they have added a lot more interest to this page than there would otherwise have been.

As of 2016/09/24 there were 65 photos on the Coober Pedy page; 13 of those were drone images, the others were taken with a Canon EOS 350D digital SLR camera. While I thought that 52% of the DSLR photos were worth displaying in high definition, I used 84% of the drone photos at high definition.