The drone business has revolutionized. With better technology and cheaper drones, aerial photography has never been easier. Actually, for the cost of a simple drone and drone camera, you may do many valuable jobs.
This includes terrain surveys, looking into difficult places, and producing aerial films. One could gain significant income by starting a drone photography venture. Professional drone technology usage often needs some kind of accreditation or licensing.
Yet, this varies by region. Drone and liability insurance will likely be required as well. Thus if you want to start making money with your drone, everything you need to know about the drone industry.
You should know about camera drones for business, drone flying to fly the drone, drone laws, drone licenses, offering your services, liability coverage, pricing packages, drone operators, or drone pilots to get your drone photography business structure in a strong shape.
This step-by-step guide will go through in-depth how to start a drone photography business.
Is Drone Photography a Viable Business?
Essentially, the response is yes. It is a huge industry that is expanding every year.
Photographing from above the ground is nothing new. There’s always been a need for stunning aerial photography and videography for commercial purposes. It doesn’t matter if it is shot from a plane or helicopter.
Aerial photography was out of reach for many industries until the current boom in drone use (and price drop). Numerous sectors are finding uses for the aerial drone photography business in your state.
The drone photography industry is rising, with applications ranging from rental properties to weddings. Drones enable aerial photographers to shoot exceptional group photos and clips.
What do Drone Photographers Earn?
Countless variables affect how much money you can make with a drone photography firm. In what subfield do you function? What is this, the real estate market? Wedding ceremonies? Conventions for Corporations?
Which services do you provide, and how valuable are they? Pricing in bundles? Pay by the hour? Numerous factors will determine the potential profitability of your drone photography corporation.
The great news is that the profit potential is through the roof. Whether you charge per hour or provide predetermined bundles doesn’t matter. You have to consider the drone’s cost and the software for drone operations.
After which, you’re just selling your expertise for money. Establish a drone photography company, and you may be able to ditch the 9-to-5 and make $100 an hour or more.
What to Do to Start A Drone Photography Business
Beginning a drone photography company entails many of the same procedures as starting any other company. Besides, you should work out certain details about doing business with drones. Launching a drone photography company is very simple.
You must focus on finding potential clients and more customers, despite what your mind may tell you. Getting paying clients is the main source of any business. But there are a few actions you must do initially. Take them in order, then.
Settle on a Definite Area of Specialization
Picking a specific market to serve is crucial when launching a commercial drone photography company. What exactly is a niche? It’s a field of work, a brand of business, or a unique application. Still not getting it?
Focusing on a single customer allows you to better serve their needs than if you were a generalist drone photographer. Let’s say you’ve settled on real estate drone photography as your expertise. You might also specialize in photographing just weddings.
Yet, won’t you stifle your potential and earning potential if you do that? You should not go for such a narrow subset of the market that it becomes difficult to make a living.
Please don’t just offer drone photography to people who want to shoot their pet puppy from above. But, photographing pets in motion may be a profitable specialty. The key is to specialize in a certain area of employment to master that field.
If you focus on weddings, you’ll gain knowledge of what clients prefer in no time. You will also learn how much they’re willing to invest and how much money you can make. Additionally, you may recycle your efforts with new customers indefinitely.
If you photographed a wedding on Saturday and real estate the next, you’d need to adjust your fees, services, etc., for each customer.
Think of yourself as a real estate photography agent who needs a bird’s-eye view of the homes they sell. Two other local businesses offer drone photography services. Including the one already mentioned.
In this case, the first one has already covered everything. When it comes to taking aerial photographs or films, they can do it all. In this regard, the latter is the area’s preeminent drone photography service for the housing market.
Which business name do you imagine the realtor will contact first? To a large extent, this is the fruit of focusing on a certain area. You want your organization to be the authority in a particular area of the drone shooting market.
Area to Start This Business
So, where would be some good places to start an aerial photography business?
- Property
- Wedding Ceremonies
- Business Functions
- Family Portraits
- Thrilling Sports (particularly those where you can buy a DVD of your leap, like bungee jumping!)
This is only a small sample of the many possible uses of the phrase. You may start a thriving drone photography firm in any industry. Such industries use motion or still pictures for documentation or ads. Do a competitive study to find two or three markets to look into further.
Identifying Competitors
At this point, you should have at least two or three potential markets or specializations in mind. You should now investigate the competitive landscape of your industry.
Find out with a simple search on Google. Try looking for items like:
- Property photography using drone services in my area
- Affordable aerial photography services are available for weddings.
- Local Company That Does Aerial Photographic Work
Seek out as many drone photography companies as possible within a practical driving distance. Those are the other teams you’ll be facing. You may have to look around to discover photography studios that do drone photography but don’t say so on their websites.
Typically professional drone photographers concentrate on weddings and not real estate. You’re now investigating the competitive landscape of your chosen specialty. Having plenty of rivals would be undesirable.
But having no rivalry at all should also raise warning flags. For the simple premise that there may be zero interest in this service in your region. Confronting rival businesses is inevitable when venturing into any industry.
What has happened here is a positive thing. This indicates a lucrative business opportunity. You can change careers later. But for now, choose a specialty that resonates with your style and gut intuition.
Analyse Competitor Regarding Charge and Facilities?
Now that you know your rivals, you must research the going rate for drone services in your area. To properly comprehend the industry, you must check how much comparable services are retailing for.
If you can’t get pricing data, search in surrounding cities until you have three or four quotations. This might serve as a baseline for your cost estimations. I use the phrase “beginning level” cause we don’t want you to undermine the market. That serves no beneficial purpose for you.
You can likely ask for far more money than you already are. To put it another way, why does one manufacturer set the jeans price at $300 while another sets it at $30? When you remove the excitement about the resources and effort, all that’s left is that people are willing to pay $300.
Set some price rates for your drone photography services. But don’t rush to set fixed rates. Write down some notes about your competitors and the prices on the market. Then get ready for the next step.
Select Drone
Establishing this business requires a small drone, photography lens, and automated operation.
You will need a high-quality camera on your drone. Given that you intend to make a living by photographing drones. There are top-tier photography drones available in the market. It can record 4K video and take 20-megapixel stills.
Professionals use drones with innovative autonomous technology, such as dynamic tracking, the focus of interest piloting and drawing a path. These will make it simple for you to take stunning pictures that will wow your customers.
The Mavic Pro is, without a doubt, the best photographic drone to launch a company.
It meets all the standards and offers 4K video and 20-megapixel still photos. You can program the drone to follow a subject independently while avoiding it. You can achieve this by using Active tracking and other features.
There is no better drone on the market now which won’t rip the bank for your possible successful drone photography business.
Study the Drone
Learn all there is to know about your brand-new, state-of-the-art photography drone.
Learn the fundamentals of flight and photography or videography. Check out the many hands-off flight options. Don’t try to “study on the field” if you wish to give off an expert vibe at your debut drone photography session.
The best way to learn how to use your new drone is to fly it. You should fly it around for at least a week while taking photos and videos. You’ll soon be able to take stunning pictures from above. Once you put in some work to improve your drone photography skills.
Following a week of “practice,” you will have plenty of material from which to choose. Select a picture editing program to transform your collection of amateur snapshots into polished works of art. Choose the best application for editing drone photos together.
Select Your Application
Simply having a drone and the ability to take images is not enough. You would want to use image editing software to complete your pictures. There are a lot of different image editing programs to choose from.
Given it comes to professional photography. If you have experience with one, you may use it to take excellent aerial photos with your drone.
GIMP and Adobe Photoshop are excellent choices if you’re looking for a picture editor. Adobe’s new subscription-based pricing model makes Photoshop more affordable for experts. You need Photoshop if you plan on making money as a drone photographer.
GIMP is a fantastic free option for editing your drone footage and photos. It’s free to use and offers many of Photoshop’s features, which makes it a good place to learn the ropes before shelling out cash for the full version.
Understand the Application
At this point, you have probably decided to use some kind of editing program to refine your drone footage. To take your photography to a new standard, you must learn how to do it skillfully.
Countless resources, including tutorials and guidelines, are available for both Photoshop & GIMP. Falling into the rabbit hole of advanced methods is simple.
Just go back to fundamentals for now:
- Putting the pictures you took with your drone into the program
- How to utilize the levels modification
- How to Modify Contrast and Lighting
- Understanding Hue and Saturation for Color Change
- Correcting Flaws
Simply looking up some straightforward guides on optimizing and beautifying your images should do the trick. Check your photography abilities by utilizing the practice photos you took the preceding week.
Acquire Credentials
Most areas limit commercial drone usage without certification or authorization. You are engaging in commercial activity when operating a drone for monetary gain.
You’ll need to research national and regional laws due to disparities. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires citizens of the United States to get a Part 107 license.
Get insured
Starting a drone photography business is expensive. This is because you need to buy a drone with a good camera.
It’s a nice idea to buy insurance for your drone. This is because if something happens and the drone needs fixing, you may even have to replace it. This will help you pay for it. A well-functioning drone is essential to the success of your company.
Depending on where you live, you may also need liability insurance over drone insurance. This will safeguard you if you hurt someone or break their property while on the field.
This is crucial since mishaps may and will occur, and you don’t wish to shut down your drone shooting company because of one!
Decide on a Pricing Point
Setting prices is a creative process. The previous inquiry should give you a fair sense of what local drone photography services offer, but there will be a lot of experimentation.
To reiterate, your price should be commensurate with the quality you provide. For this reason, it is not recommended to bill per hour for photography services. As an alternative, you could provide bundled price options.
If you’re offering wedding drone photography services, for instance, you may offer two different bundles:
Package A includes a two-hour photo session, digital downloads, and 20 prints of your choosing. Price $1000
Package B includes a professional photographer for four hours, all digital files, 50 prints, and a photographic movie. $2500.00
These are only illustrations, but even these two sample bundles show how many ways there are to add worth and increase pricing.
Following are some suggestions for enhancing the profitability of your drone photography company:
- Expand the time allotted for the picture session.
- Deliver high-quality images for a selected number of images.
- Photos should be provided both digitally and in printed editions of varying dimensions
- Offer personalized picture albums
- Make a personalized video slideshow.
An old but brilliant pricing rule of thumb was to triple the price at which you would feel “comfortable.” A higher price point is virtually always possible. Do your best to add greater value to what you already do!
Acquire Customers
You have all the equipment necessary to start your drone photography enterprise. These include a drone, picture editing software, a license, insurance, and a set of prices. Discovering promising clients is the latter approach.
The steady flow of new customers is the single most crucial factor in the growth of your drone shooting firm.
Ultimately, this is a matter of marketing and, more especially, leadership development. You should develop a few methods to generate fresh leads constantly. Because of this, you should devote most of your effort and energy here.
Two primary methods exist for attracting customers to your drone photography company:
- Get involved with another photographic company as a partner.
- Reaching out directly.
A guideline for forming a photographic alliance
Look around your neighborhood for other photography studios that meet the needs of your target market. See whether they provide drone photography services already. Approach them individually and explain how your services might assist their business.
You gain because they find consumers and pay you to complete a project, and they do so because you offer them more to market and offer. You lose some price flexibility but can focus on building relationships with your ideal customers.
Techniques for Direct Interaction
You must promote and locate consumers for a successful drone photography business. Customer acquisition and advertising is a vast field that may someday be the subject of its feature article.
Due to the universality of marketing principles, you may learn some methods independently.
Just ensure you don’t overextend yourself. Choose one course of action and see it through before trying another. You will never know which yields the greatest results without fully investing in each tactic.
Attempt the following first:
Get in touch with organizations that provide related products or services. If you provide wedding drone photography, start by contacting local wedding organizers. Perhaps they will promote your services to their clientele.
Create an Instagram account to share your finished products.
Advertise on Facebook
Advertise on Google
The most challenging aspect of launching a drone photography company is drawing in your first paying customer. You ought to put up the work and think creatively to be successful.
Please do not keep your actions a secret; share them with the world. Communicate this to your close circle of acquaintances. Let the person next to you on the plane know. Make an offer to take complimentary photos in return for a review.
When you have your first potential client, impress them with your drone shots, so they’ll refer you.
Guidelines for Establishing a Lucrative Drone Photography Company
Beginning any kind of company, particularly one that involves drones for photography, may be complicated. You are delivering a service that is quite advanced in its technological nature.
- The following are the most important pieces of advice to ensure your success:
- Have the most cutting-edge technology available.
- Master your tools, processes, and applications.
- Advertising.
- Always be sure to ask for REFERENCES and testimonies.
After you’ve perfected your marketing strategy, you’ll be so busy that you’ll have to turn people away. When this happens, recruiting extra people to assist you and grow is necessary.
Conclusions
Running a drone photography company may be difficult without expertise and experience. You can get your digital business up and running in no time if you have photos of your best works that buyers will want to buy.
You need the right tactics, some help, and perseverance to succeed. In closing, we hope you’ve found this post helpful in your pursuit of how to start a drone photography business.
You may read: