A wedding photo Dale Stierman shot using an unmanned aircraft. Photo courtesy Dale Stierman, Picture Perfect.

by Danielle Lucey

With unmanned aircraft crashing wedding parties around the world, soon wedding photographers might need to know as much about E-stops as they already know about F-stops.



“People want drone photography first. If they can get something nobody else can get, then people are really apt to go for it, especially in the wedding industry, going crazy as it is. People want the newest, the best, and they want outdo their maid of honor or their bridal party,” says photographer Dale Stierman.



Stierman, who owns Picture Perfect, a photography company in Dubuque, Iowa, got the idea to meld his RC helicopter hobby with his lifelong passion for taking photos about two months ago. Quickly, the option to shoot weddings with his team’s DJI Phantom became the hottest trend to hit Iowa’s wedding photography scene, and media coverage from CBS marqueed Stierman’s business in national headlines. Ever since, his phone has been ringing nonstop.

 

“We’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of phone calls in the last three weeks from other photographers around the country asking for advice, and asking for ideas, and even asking basically our procedure,” he says.



Stierman got his start snapping scenes when he was a child, following his photojournalist father to shoots as soon as he was old enough to carry a camera bag. The pair took on wedding photography when Stierman’s dad, Dale W. Stierman, transitioned to entrepreneurship. 



Stierman is also an RC helicopter hobbyist, and as soon as he realized how easy it was to fly a small quadrotor compared to a four-channel single rotor, he decided to give drone wedding photography a go, he says. 



“They got to drop down in price so much that we started looking into them,” he says. “And I actually had a friend of a friend who had one and asked if I wanted to use it sometime.” 



He knew the device could push his wedding photography business to new technological levels after hearing about Realtors in California using unmanned aircraft to shoot photos of houses for sale. Stierman says he knew using the DJI Phantom to shoot around Dubuque’s difficult terrain would mean his business would have the ability to take pictures in places no other photography firm in the area could. 



“There’s lots of twists and lots of buildings that are tall on the [Mississippi] river’s edge that no photographer [could get to],” he says. “The river’s so wide there, you couldn’t shoot it from the Illinois side from a feasible lens, and you really couldn’t get high enough with a ladder or anything like that. … I knew this would probably be the only way. So I took this crazy idea, and I had a bride that was willing to let me do my thing, and it worked out well.”



Stierman says that safety is his priority when going on shoots with drones, going so far as to airbrush out security personnel that serve as drone bouncers, standing near the bride and groom during the shots so if anything goes awry, they can safeguard the wedding party. 



He flies with a minimum of four personnel staged around the scene as a precaution.



“The big thing is we don’t fly over people,” he says. “We don’t go anywhere near large groups of people. We have a telescopic lens that goes on the camera so we can get three times further away than your standard GoPro or your standard point and shoot that you would put on top of smaller drones.”



His recent customers have taken him to destinations like Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and Saint Maarten in the Caribbean, meaning he has to research airspace laws everywhere he goes. 



Stierman is careful to warn customers that not every day will have conditions that are conducive to flying. Should the winds pick up or the weather turn foul, he grounds the systems for the day. 



“We always tell our brides that it can’t be guaranteed, because we don’t want to be throwing up a drone in 45 mph wind gusts when there’s 400 people on the ground. It’s just not gonna happen,” he says. “If the weather isn’t cooperating, then we just don’t fly. And if they’re getting married at a Holiday Inn that’s two miles from airport, we’re not going to do that either.” 



Not all of his small-town Iowa clients were immediately receptive to the idea of using drones for wedding shoots. 



“When people hear drone, they automatically think government conspiracy, spy planes, something like that,” he says. “We’ve actually changed our terminology to quadcopter, because it’s less threatening to the people. So we actually kind of avoid the word drone just simply because, especially in this area in the Midwest, when people hear drone, they think negatively about it.”



And despite its popularity, Stierman is skeptical about unmanned aircraft taking over the 

entire wedding photography business. 



“Traditional wedding photographers, especially some of the old school ones that are around here that have been around for a while, they look at it as gimmick. They look at it as basically another phase that people go through,” he says. “And ultimately we know from doing it only the month and a half, two months, we’ve been doing it, we know every wedding can’t be shot with a drone. It’s just not feasible.”



Stierman says that drone wedding photography would likely not work in places like the Las Vegas Strip or downtown Chicago, where not only are there more people on the ground, but privacy is a bigger issue. However, his Iowa business will likely have a leg up because of the systems. 





“I think it’s going to go on for years with us because of how much open land we have here,” he says. “ … Our ideas are going to go on for a long time.”

<< Back to the News