We were delighted to be invited to come and film alongside the team from the BBC’s The One Show down at the Swanage Railway.
We were part of an article that they were creating regarding the rejoining of the Swanage train station to the main railway line, something that’s been achieved through a huge amount of work by a team of volunteers in a large part. We were to provide aerial footage of the beautiful steam engine puffing its way along the route – the chocolate box Dorset countryside and you really couldn’t ask for a more picturesque backdrop.
A very friendly farmer allowed us to use his field as a takeoff and landing site as it was adjacent to the rail track, giving us the opportunity to get beautiful views of the train as it headed over from Corfe Castle towards Swanage. Then we moved off to Norden station where we were able to interact even more closely with the train as it left the current final station on the line, filming almost trackside to create rising views of the drone disappearing into the steam plumes as the engine chugged beneath.
Despite relatively high winds on the day, our Matrice and Inspire fleet of craft were more than equal to the task of creating stable and stylish footage to capture both the engine and the environment with plenty pieces of the footage being used in the finished piece on BBC 1.
Flown the Same Way Each Visit: The Aerial Progress Record on a Construction Site
A construction site changes faster than almost any ground we fly, and the question asked six months later is usually about a day that has already passed. Repeat aerial capture answers it, but only if the visits are genuinely comparable. This piece sets out what has to stay fixed between flights, the ground sample distance, the overlap and the time of day, why control is re-established on every return, and where the method stops.
A Thermal Picture Is Not a Finding: What a Solar PV Survey Report Has to Carry
A thermal image shows that something on a solar array is warmer than its neighbours. It does not say which module, how much warmer than what, how serious it is, or what should happen next. This is what turns an anomaly into a located, classified and prioritised finding, what the reporting requirements of IEC 62446-3 ask a survey report to carry, and why that document is a different object altogether from a set of thermal pictures.
What Makes a Roof Photograph Worth Having
Roof inspection by drone is a crowded service, and most of it is genuinely the same. What varies is whether the photographs answer the question that prompted the enquiry. This post looks past the flying at the images themselves: why distance, angle and light decide what a frame resolves, how a detail shot becomes evidence when a wider frame places it on the building, and the things no photograph of a roof will ever tell you.
