Dancing in a wet grassland

S. is a modern dancer and a choreograph. She was born in Limburg, a southern area in the Netherlands and currently lives in Amsterdam. She regularly performs as a dancer, her specialisation is modern dance and she is used to and likes to dance nude. We met at the Weesp train station which is near to Amsterdam and went for the Maarse Plassen, a nature area with a lot of water, seemingly flooded land where old ditches and dikes are still visible in the lake. We choose the area near the A1 highway. Parking the car to enter the area was not easy, after a while we found a road leading to some houses near the water.

The area seemed to be rural, except for some old homes near the lake. To our surprise a taxi-company was located here. We passed the houses, and found a small path leading around he lake. After walking the path for a while, we found a field that looked like an old small agriculture field, not used for several years. Walking into the field we quickly discovered that it was not just the grass that was wet, the ground itself seemed to be soaked too. Moving forward we were happy to find a slightly higher spot of several meters radius, an area where our feet would not be slowly descending into the mud.

Here S layed down for some photoos and films. From above, the muddy field revealed to have multiple colours. The dry areas had a different vegetation than the other areas, resulting in different colour and this made the field interesting when seen from above.

After some lying poses, I asked S. to dance while the drone would cirkel her. This function in the Litchi program is called Orbit. Programming the orbit was difficult and it has some limits. The minimal height is 5 meter, and when the drone is near the subject the drone will therefore look down. Looking down on a standing person is not as beautiful as a more horizontal view, but the Orbit settings were limited, probably for safety reasons. To my surprise, the drone started as programmed at 5 meter height, but slowly descended during the flight. At one point it flew about one meter from the ground, almost touching the reed vegetation. The view on dancing S was great, but somehow the lighting was difficult. The weather was cold but there was also a bright sun and the contrast between bodyparts lightened by the sun and bodyparts in the shadow was too high, resulting in bad ligthing for one of the two. Also, the drone flew close to S. since the field was only about 20 meters wide. A larger circle would make the drone crash into trees or 3 meter high reed.

Lessons learned: vegetation differences in a field can be beautiful, full sun is warm but causes difficulties with image lighting. Drone can descend to dangerous height when orbiting.

To Do: use vegetation differences for photoos, find a field with more space to try the dancing orbit again.