Sometimes a drone flight produces more than a video.
These two wide panoramic views of Mallacoota were taken from the same aerial footage used in my latest music video, “You’re the Ones Who Did”. I liked the frames enough to take them out of the moving image, prepare them for print, and turn them into large framed canvases.
Both finished works are approximately 152 × 51 cm, so they are a little over 1.5 metres wide. At that scale the shape of the Mallacoota lakes system really opens up.
Looking across the Mallacoota waterways
The first panorama looks across the entrance, township, islands and winding channels towards the coast.
Mallacoota from above, printed as a 152 × 51 cm framed panoramic canvas.
What works particularly well at this scale is the relationship between the town and the water. From ground level we tend to experience Mallacoota as separate beaches, roads, jetties and sections of lake. From the air it becomes one connected landscape.
Looking back across the lake
The second panorama turns the viewpoint around, with the open lake dominating the foreground and Mallacoota stretched across the middle distance.
The Mallacoota lakes and township, 152 × 51 cm framed canvas.
The shallow water, sandbanks and deeper channels create extraordinary colour changes. Those patterns are constantly changing with light, tide, wind and water level, which is one reason I keep finding new photographs even after years of flying over the same country.
From a moving image to a wall print
These photographs began as frames within a 4K drone flight around Mallacoota's lakes and waterways.
There is something quite different about extracting a single moment from video and then printing it at more than a metre and a half wide. Details that pass in seconds on screen become part of the photograph: boats, islands, channels, sandbanks, roads and the shape of the town itself.
The wide 3:1 panoramic format also suits Mallacoota particularly well. This is a landscape that tends to spread horizontally rather than fit neatly into a conventional photograph.
Watch the drone flight: “You’re the Ones Who Did”
The flight became the visual setting for one of my recent original songs, “You’re the Ones Who Did”.
The song is an Australian indie-folk protest ballad examining contemporary arguments over women's sex-based rights, privacy, sport, female-only spaces and legal definitions. It is deliberately political, while the Mallacoota aerial footage provides a very different visual counterpoint: open water, winter sky and a landscape moving quietly beneath the argument.
The contrast was intentional. Rather than illustrate every lyric literally, I prefer using local drone footage to give the music space.
For those interested mainly in Mallacoota, it is also simply a substantial aerial tour of the lakes and waterways in 4K.
Mallacoota from another perspective
One of the things I enjoy about drone photography is that the same flight can become several different things: a film, part of a song, individual photographs, large-format prints and a permanent record of how Mallacoota looked on a particular day.
These two canvases are probably the largest examples I have produced from this flight so far.
And at 1.52 metres wide, they certainly make Mallacoota difficult to miss.
