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.
The 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
