Why does almost everyone hate drones?

<p>A bear attacks a drone, we all applaud. A eagle knocks one out of the sky, we all cheer! And then there is the guy who shot one down over his house (he's in real trouble). To me they represent one of science fictions worst predictions come true. A silent, unseen device capable of following you around and watching everything you do and listening to everything you say.</p>

<p>Simple.<br>

No matter what the new innovations are, there is a small group of people that screw it up for the rest of us.</p>

<p>Are you talking about drones with cameras, or drones with Amazon packages, or drones with bombs?</p>

<p>I guess I would say all. How is that working out for Amazon packages?</p>

<p>I only really hate drones when they fly in the flight/landing path of other aircraft. But I also hate lasers since they can be pointed at pilots. What I really hate are bananas - they are a vile tasting fruit with a very nauseating texture.</p>

<p>Really--the only fruit that doesn't require washing? And those Dole stickers are perfect for covering the spy camera on your Mac.</p>

I think they can be obnoxious. An uncontrolled flying object that adds to the noise level. I am not pleased that B and H sells them either. I believe they will turn into a nuisance as a toy that childish adults play with. I say license the users. Get a way to ID the unit when it is out of bounds. Train raptor birds to pick them off!! Go little falcon, go kill that drone, and watch the rotors...

A banana is not a banana Brian. Cavendish bananas are tasteless. There are varieties that do not travel well but are tastier.. Love the fruit...not when over ripe but that is personal, I like a little green on them...

<p>"Almost everyone?"<br /><br />Just today a neighbor asked me if I'd fly one of my mutirotor camera birds over her house to get a close look at her chimney and shingles, the better to decide if she needs to get a roofer up there. I have clients that, at this point, would consider some of our routine commercial shoots to be completely inadequate if there weren't some overhead shots. I've got a gig next week where a guy who does high-end landscaping wants before-and-afters from multiple perspectives, and some slickly produced video of a finished hardscaping project around a large pool. Once he saw what we could do with camera-carrying drones coasting at tree-top height over his projects, his creative juices really started flowing. He's hooked, now, and coming up with some really cool ideas.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>A silent, unseen device capable of following you around and watching everything you do and listening to everything you say.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Have you ever actually been around any of these devices in use, Sanford? They're not silent. They can't possibly follow you around without you knowing about them, and they're certainly a terrible choice for any attempt to record what you're saying - they're much too loud for onboard mics to pic up anything but prop and motor noise. They can only stay in the air for very short periods of time, are incredibly fragile ... what you're describing is essentially cartoon-quality fantasy at this point.<br /><br />And ... Amazon deliveries? They're barely under way, on the research side of things. But lots of people are working on such uses. In Europe, they've tested the ability for GPS-guided small machines to quickly ferry things like insulin or other small payloads to off-shore oil rigs or to small islands that don't have regularly scheduled air service. You're not ever going to see Amazon drones dropping things off at your front porch. Picture them running on-demand small supplies to office park rooftop mail drop chutes that have been pre-established for that use ... and presto, way, way less diesel fuel being burned and road space being used by delivery trucks driving office-to-office in some congested areas.<br /><br />Others are using them for archaeological research (numerous ruins and other features have been found where on-foot-only exploration would be very time consuming for teams that have only limited days in certain areas). And biologists are loving them for monitoring certain wildlife scenarios. Utility workers are using them for everything from dangerous power line inspection to checking the scrubbers on 200' stacks at power plants - something that used to require a lengthy shut-down and a risky climb by workers. Companies are using them to inspect pipelines for signs of stress or trouble they'd otherwise take weeks to review by other means, or spend huge amounts of money and fuel to look at less usefully from much higher altitudes by conventional aircraft.<br /><br />They've tested them for delivering things like anti-venom across rugged terrain to ranger stations in parks. They're being used for search and rescue, to help in situations like little kids lost in the woods at night. During some recent flooding in the south, local volunteers used a small drone to get a light drag line across to people trapped in a house surrounded by rushing, rapidly rising water, the better to set up a rescue tow rope. Fire departments are testing FLIR-carrying quadcopters to help spot possibly deadly hot spots on roof-tops, so they know where it's safe to deploy firefighters who are trying to save lives and structures.<br /><br />Turn on your TV for a few minutes. You will see new low-altitude aerial camera work in all sorts of traditional productions, including ads, that would otherwise have been impossible, or required prohibitively expensive or logistically impossible helicopter use. Farmers are using them to inspect hundreds of acres of delicate crops in 30 minutes, instead of all day - and that's allowing them to make smarter irrigation decisions, reduce their use of fertilizers and pesticides, and to more efficiently plan harvests and planting (which means more food per acre and gallon of water, less fuel burned to produce it, and farmers who can competitively get more done on a tighter budget).<br /><br />If you want to hate a tool, first spend some time with people who use them, and make your hate more educated. A lot of people would consider those evil photographers with 600mm lenses who claim to be "nature photographers" to be obvious peeping creeps... why does everyone hate long lenses, right?</p>

<p>The Press loves them. It give them a subject that they can vilify and write about. Of course there are the idiots that use them inappropriately or don't know how to use them and crash them into things. The idiots provide the gasoline to pour on the presses' flames. <br /><br />The only news they make is bad news. You don't see stories or videos (unless you go to YouTube or Vimeo, etc.) of the beautiful photography and video that's being done. How they can peer into things and be useful in gaining information that otherwise is humanly impossible. <br /><br />They are like anything else. They can be used for good or for bad. Only the bad makes news and when the press finds a villain, they like to pile on.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>

<p><a href="https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=83445&cid=TW329">Close encounters.</a></p>

I like helicopters and we would never have seen Julie Andrews on the hill top at the opening of film Sound of Music without chopper and photographer hanging out the window... That said, I would not want them hovering over the trails in the Grand Canyon. Or out there at below 500 feet on a Sunday morning. And Kauai has limits on choppers and certain hours to fly. Not unreasonable limits..new technology, takes time to get a grip on it..

<p>Matt, I'm referring to the coming of the insect sized drone.</p>

<p>Yes, some idiots haven't figured out, yet, that being stupid with RC aircraft (which people have been flying for decades!) around airports is a bad idea. Though I've seen more than one pilot explain that the particulars of many of the reports being mentioned add up to obvious false positives, bird sightings, and more. Obviously it's bad enough when a plane crashes because it did something like have the bad luck to ingest several geese into all of its engines ... hitting a man-made object is a forced error that nobody needs. Of course, there are people who fly kits hundreds of feet up into controlled airspace, or who have weather balloons, higher end model rockets, and more all wander into dangerous territory.<br /><br />We haven't had a single collision yet, and there are literally millions of mutirotors being flow. Millions. And in the time since they've become popular, more people have died kayaking, shoveling snow, riding in a bus to the airport, or in flames at the hands of suicidal/murderous commercial pilots. Well, even one person would be more than the <em>zero</em> that we can currently chalk up to model aircraft, not counting a couple of notable large-scale model helicopter stunt-flying accidents over the years. Point is, for something that people armed with little information love to vilify, there sure are a lot of OTHER things that are in real life actually more dangerous and involved in countless deaths and injuries ... but because those things have been around longer, it's no longer click-bait on the sensationalized news web sites.<br /><br />Meanwhile, if some guy with a drone helps to find your lost or injured family member, be sure to call a local reporter and try to get it some press, OK? I can tell you that every single person with whom I've interacted while operating one of my drones has gone away from the conversation intrigued, fascinated, and in many cases of a completely different mind than when their entire opinion was formed by drive-by hype on the evening news or in some alarmist, context-free HuffPo scare piece trying to get eyes on web ads.</p>

<p>I like that one, Matt: "<em>educated hate</em>". Sounds like an oxymoron to me.<br>

I can strongly condemn certain forms of usages of drones, which are known to have cost thousands of civilian deaths in the Middle East in recent years (mainly in North Western Pakistan), but I don't bother hating the thing as such. </p>

<p>I don't think it is "educated hate". Many people just have a visceral negative reaction to drones without any prompting from anyone. Aging hippies I would guess.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Sounds like an oxymoron to me.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That's the whole point. Except that people who think they ARE educated on the matter are the ones who say they "hate drones," and then point to non-existent scenarios to show why. There are real-world consequences for holding that mal-informed position.<br /><br />Anders: Airstrikes <em>intended</em> to kill people, made using large, multi-million dollar machines that aren't meaningfully different than traditional manned military aircraft (except for burning a lot less fuel, and being simpler to maintain) aren't - and you know this - part of the same conversation as a tiny number of people in incidents with 4-pound, plastic, GoPro carrying quadcopters that are essentially toy helicopters like people have been using in their back yards for many years. Lumping together everything that flies through the air without a pilot on board as a "drone" is just silly, and doing so in public discourse is part of the reason why under-informed people form such irrational thoughts on the matter. It's why people ask questions like "why does almost everyone <em>hate drones?</em>" (see the OP, in this case). Given your inclusion of military machines in the conversation, one might as well ask, "Why does everyone hate aircraft?"<br /><br />Sanford seems worried about some near-future scenario where his life is being spied on (most of us aren't that interesting) by insect-sized flying surveillance robots. He mentions "drones." You invoke your distaste for military air strikes made against, for example, Taliban insurgents planting IEDs along roads, and include that in the same conversation. And yet when people bring this subject up in the context of photography (here we are on PN), that absurdly too-broad of a brush with which that now essentially meaningless word ("drone") is now being used means that almost no useful information is conveyed. Every conversations that drops in that word either has to begin and end as a low-information exercise in futility, or it has to involve a lot of exposition so that people can talk in some sort of useful context. <br /><br />I talk about it in practical, real-life applications that revolves around the off-the-shelf tools that photographers, videographers, and other specialists are now using. That's in a deliberate attempt to prevent people from reflexively conflating such tools with military aircraft, or only-on-TV Sci Fi applications like insect-sized things that follow you around all day. I find that most of the voices in these conversations don't speak from any sort of direct experience, only from the pointless inclusion of completely unrelated things (like 10-meter military aircraft flying around at 10+ thousand meters and serviced by crews of people) or depictions of non-existent things. And yet it's people's distaste for dystopian sci-fi hardware or their dislike of armed conflict that seems to be driving their personal antipathy towards things like their local photographer's customer expectations to have a small camera 10 meters in the air to get a nice real estate marketing shot for a web site.<br /><br />In other words, folks: quit talking about how much you sci fi drones that don't exist or military air strikes that use remotely piloted airplanes. Neither has anything to do with the hardware that so many photographers are now putting to work, and which are the right sort of topic for this web site.</p>

<p>My first encounter with a drone was above Hanauma Bay State Park, Oahu. I had hiked up a ridge in the early morning to photograph the sunrise over the bay. It was a Tuesday, the day of the week that access to the water in the bay is closed and there were only a couple of other people hiking the ridge that were there. It was very quiet and peaceful and I was contemplating the beauty of nature, when all of a sudden this f***ing drone buzzes by me and continues to fly through my field of view. I never saw the pilot. I suppose that drones are like ATVs or Jet Skis, acceptable for rescue missions, or in the case of ATVs, for farm work, but otherwise a loud and obnoxious affront. On the other hand, being an engineer, I am tempted to play with the things, if I could do it in a responsible manner. </p>

<p>Sorry, don't mean to sound quite like that when I say, "quit doing" X ... but that's the problem, here. It's as if every discussion of <em>cameras</em> included discussions of not only quality street photography, but also people who try to get up-the-dress shots on subway trains and escalators, because, you know ... cameras! Substitute "camera" for every time someone says "drone," and you'll quickly understand why people who actually use those tools (both cameras and "drones") constructively get pretty tired, pretty quickly, of the context-free complaints about all drones as if there even were such a monolithic topic.<br /><br />Unless we've got the Off Topic juice back, it seems better to assume that when someone brings up the topic here, it's in the context of photography - whether for fun or business. But photography. We all, as photographers, have a duty (to ourselves, if nothing else) to help people talk about photographic tools of all kinds with more clarity. Because the people who assume that everyone shooting landscape or real estate shots from 100' in the air with a GoPro are actually reading their bank statement through the kitchen window ... those are the same people who assume that every street photographer is a perv, and every bird photographer is a sleazy paparazzi. </p>

<blockquote>

<p>"Unless we've got the Off Topic juice back, it seems better to assume that when someone brings up the topic here, it's in the context of photography - whether for fun or business. "</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Agreed, and further digressions into politics will be deleted. There's plenty of room for spirited debate on the subject that is relevant to photography.</p>

<p>I hope there is still room for addressing legitimate public safety concerns with respect to drone usage when making photographs. For example, in the last two months in drought-stricken California we've had massive wildfires where drones have interfered with fire-fighting efforts five times, twice delaying air tanker delivery of retardant. I'm sure the operators made some truly remarkable fire storm imagery and videos, but in the end, at least to me, those were very selfish acts and should be subject to criminal prosecution and civil sanctions.</p>

<p>Sure, safety concerns are relevant, as long as photography is the main issue.</p>

<p>Same as methods used to tether or secure cameras overhead in gyms when photographing basketball, volleyball, etc. Recording activities from overhead - whether using tethered cameras or drones - shouldn't expose others to danger.</p>

<p>Or the use of sports/active cameras like GoPros to record extreme sports and stunts. For extreme sports, recording is incidental to the activity. But stunts like drifting in heavy traffic expose innocent passersby to danger, so it's a gray zone between relevance to photography and public safety.</p>

<p>I think we can accommodate these debates without digressing into disputes over nationalism, military interventions, politics, etc.</p>

<p>In California, where we're suffering through a large number of wildfires due to a severe drought, fire-fighting aircraft have been impeded from dropping fire retardants by photographic drones controlled by idiots. <strong><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/us/california-freeway-fire/">Here is one report</a>. <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/24/425652212/in-the-heat-of-the-moment-drones-are-getting-in-the-way-of-firefighters">Here is another. </a></strong></p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Simple.<br /> No matter what the new innovations are, there is a small group of people that screw it up for the rest of us.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>I think Willis summed it up nicely, and Brad's example is right on. The usual sequence of events is:</p>

<p>1. A new device is invented which captures public attention; then,<br>

2. Some idiotic misuse of the device causes an injury, death, and/or property damage; followed by,<br>

3. Lawyers salivating copiously while waiting for the first lawsuit; resulting in,<br>

4. Imposition of knee-jerk legal restrictions which affect even legitimate users.</p>

<p>Any of this sound familiar?</p>

<p>Perhaps many feel that way because it's change and people generally don't like change. Not just change, but something new and something new is just 'one more thing.'</p>

<p>I would love to make aerial shots of urban coyotes, especially when they go off to hide where I can't go. But when I would photograph them with equipment with no Z axis other than a tripod at the city water reclamation plant and its fenced surrounds, passers by a few times called the real police for my 'suspicious' activity. Had I been operating a camera on a drone flying over the plant and it's surrounds?</p>

<p>Also, the long lens was limiting with rabbits, but rabbits can be pretty entertaining. They looked gorgeous when lofting through the low brush to escape approaching coyotes, I could just see flashes of their tails. Their multiple tails seem to land randomly so I imagine a coyote would be confused about where to run if in pursuit, looked like fish jumping in a lake in the right light, or random waves of bunny tails flashing. Awsome really, seeing how nature works to confuse a pursuer of social prey animals. With a drone I could be right there with it and have more than a few pixels of it? Sitting there outside the plant's fence fiddling with an electronic control unit and no visible drone I fear I would be seeing a lot more of the police, in this imagined instance, the police more agitated?</p>