BELFAST, Maine — Jon Linn has a fleet of eight drones, all of them equipped with cameras for aerial photography, and he’d be the first to acknowledge that over the years, there's been mishaps.
“The first one arrived by UPS,” he recalled. “I charged the battery, flew, and bam! Right into a brick wall. Pieces on the ground," he shrugged. “I learned my lesson well.”
Since 2014, Linn, a retired engineer who had previously never done anything with a camera besides taking casual family pictures, has launched drones for aerial photography.
The shots he captures shows Maine as you’ve never seen it, with its bays, rivers, mountains, and towns portrayed with a fresh, unexpected perspective.
“It sounds pretentious to call this ‘art,’ but I’ve gotten responses from people that are actually thoughtful, stimulated by what they see in the picture,” he said. “So I guess it’s getting toward art.”
To a large degree, photographers who shoot outdoors are at the mercy of the weather. The first thing Linn does before deciding whether to pack his gear for an excursion is check the forecast.
“I’ve really no interest in blue sky,” he said. “I want some texture up there.”
If the sky is filled with cloud formations that look interesting, he gets to work. Not until the drone comes in for a landing and he looks at the images does he really know if he’s shot something special.
“A lot of the stuff I find is kind of boring on foot — not when I get up in the air, because it’s a whole different composition.”