beautiful drone footage shows autumn in utah

I don’t know about you, dear readers, but my favorite season has always been Autumn. It’s warm enough to enjoy the outdoors but cool enough to show off your jacket fashions. It’s a time for apple cider, pumpkin pie, and decorative gourds. Plus, give me spooky Halloween skeletons or a turkey feast over a Christmas tree any day.

But the most iconic and beautiful image of Autumn will always be the changing of the leaves from their ordinary green to a vibrant collection of reds, yellows, and fiery oranges. And now, using a DJI Phantom 4 with a polarized filter, a videographer named Justin McFarland has shown us the changing of the seasons as we’ve never seen it before:

This gorgeous bird’s eye view of the Snowbasin ski resort in Ogden Valley, northern Utah, has been edited in post-production to turn the valley’s natural green and red hues into vivid yellows and pinks. But while the edited version went viral, the original footage – which can be found on McFarland’s instagram page – is even more impressive, a relatively subdued but still beautiful portrait of this unique part of the country.

The talent on display here is undeniable – it’s amazing how stable the footage is even on what must have been a fairly windy Fall day. He uses a mixture of top-down angles and sweeping panoramic views to communicate the full scope of the Ogden Valley, and some of the alternate takes show him flying over streams and busy roads. It’s a wonderfully peaceful image – the perfect counterbalance for a stressful time in the lives of many Americans.

Of course, the Phantom 4 is an excellent drone that we’ve written about several times on this site, one which makes taking good video relatively simple. Of course, this was before the editing-in-camera features of the more recent DJI Mavic 2, so McFarland would still have had to treat the colors in post-production using some kind of third-party software, which makes the achievement more impressive from a purely technical standpoint. However, some commenters have taken umbrage with the choice to use unnatural coloring over letting the beauty of nature speak for itself.

Unseasonably warm temperatures mean that we’ll be waiting a bit longer to see the leaves in my own home state, but what about yours? Are the leaves near you starting to turn? Will you be taking a drone out to capture some footage of your own? We’d love to hear from you in the comments – and in the meantime, we hope you’ve enjoyed this lovely piece of drone art. There’s always something wonderful about the native of a particular region using drones to capture the beauty that they grew up with – even when that beauty is edited to include purple trees!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *