Early signs of a revolution

Sometimes the social revolution lands on us seemingly out of the blue, but sometimes we can see it coming. This week, because of my wife’s conservation activities, I was fortunate to see aerial footage of Guyana, taken separately by two owners of drones fitted with high-tech cameras, and I’m here to give you the wink: a revolution is coming from this device and one aspect of it will be the impact it will create on tourism destinations showing their product in new exciting ways.

soitgoThe views that can now be garnered of landscapes by these drones fitted with high-tech cameras are astonishing. The drones are quite small, often just two feet square, extremely light, virtually noiseless, and operate for hours with small rechargeable batteries. The device is operated by someone standing in the open anywhere and controlling it with two small toggle switches as commonly used in video games. The operator can be in control of the drone and its camera as far as a mile away, and tracks its movements from a cell-phone-size screen. From their vantage point of several hundred feet up, coupled with their ability to hover and twist and turn, the drone cameras allow us to see the terrain below in ways never before possible, and the results often take one’s breath away. Drone camera footage of Georgetown shows us the city as never before because it is as if we’re seeing the area from a balloon moving slowly, and the drone can hover over a spot, or go back over it, with the camera zooming in or zooming out, or even doing a 360-degree circle over a location. With a high-quality camera on board, the footage is sharp, with vivid colours, and the images are always in focus. A drone camera moving over Merriman Mall in an easterly direction shows you the area in astonishing detail, including the recent refurbishment, and leaves you with a new appreciation of what we have there. The same camera, moving from central Georgetown, with St George’s Cathedral below, captures footage you want to send to your friends, particularly the ones critical of Guyana.

It is when the process moves out into the interior, however, that the drone footage production is most effective. Those landscape images of Guyana, even on a standard computer screen, are so striking that looking at them makes you want to go there. Even if one knows an area, the ability of the drone camera to cruise over it slowly at several hundred feet is affording us a completely different perspective of the terrain – one that we could never get from a ground-based camera – and the effect is almost magical.

In one sequence, the operator flew the camera drone in a slow pass over Jordan Falls, turning back to cover the same ground, showing the astonishing beauty of the area. The view, from that height, reveals completely new aspects of the Falls to which one is completely oblivious at ground level. From the picture of the powerful boulders and rocks interspersed with the falling water on all sides, one can almost envisage the formation of the landscape in the creation of the earth. It is as if the energy and the power are still there, thousands of years later. In recent months many such riveting sequences have been captured by various drone camera photographers and there have been several occasions where Guyanese watching such landscape footage have been heard to say, “I never knew Guyana to be like this.” Although I have seen much of the interior in my days as a young man in B G Airways, that was my reaction to a sequence shot in the South Rupununi; I was looking at images I had never dreamed existed here.

This new approach to photographing our landscape is now in its infancy, but some of the early footage simply stops you in your tracks; that is the effect even on persons who are experts on our own interior and its many beautiful settings. Seeing such footage for the first time, of an area new to them, persons will often say, “Show me that again,” and that comment is often followed by, “I want to go there.” For the tourism industry, with persons considering various vacation choices, that kind of reaction is priceless – it will drive demand.

Certainly other factors will be in play as to the timing and the extent of the shift – Guyana’s airlift; our crime level; the financial situation of those watching the footage; their inclination for travel; their attitude towards ‘roughing it’; whether they’re too young or too old for the journey – but the interest will be created. In the interim, with no official control of drones currently in Guyana, such regulations will have to be introduced for safety reasons, but the wide benefits from these devices – agriculture being a prime one – are obvious at the initial look. For those involved in our fledgling tourism industry, the scenes from those drones, taken from an elevation previously available only to aircraft pilots, are simply too enthralling to resist. As they become widely available you will see for yourself. Guyanese will be drawn to visiting those places, and persons abroad will be propelled to come see where we live.