We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kyle Dobbins. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kyle below.
Kyle, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
To be honest, it has been a long process of trial and error over the past five and half years. While I have become quite good at flying, even now I’m still learning new things while flying the drone and with correct photography settings. It’s a lot more in-depth than just stop, point and shoot like most photos taken today with various devices. Time and days without rain would definitely have helped me speed up the process, but time with my family and my full-time job kept me busy with 60-80+ hour work weeks. Things have changed now, and I have a bit more free time to dedicate to the hobby and other things. The skills most essential are good hand and eye coordination. In my younger years, I played a lot of video games and holding an RC Remote for a drone is close to the layout of a controller for a game console. Flying was second nature from all those years of experience playing games. Now, I have been taking photos for almost 25 years, but most of those were point and shoot. I had never gotten into taking RAW photos and editing them with Photoshop and Lightroom to a degree of my liking. I spent months watching YouTube tutorials and editing test photos along with the instructor so that I could built the knowledge and experience to edit and produce images that would catch one’s eye.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Kyle Dobbins, and I am the owner of Dobbins Aerial Photography. I have been doing aerial photography for about five and half years. My interest in drones came from a hot air balloon ride I won from a work raffle back in 2017. At that time, I was using an iPad to take photos on the ground and from the sky during my flight. I thought about how amazing it would be to be able to capture aerial shots everywhere I went and all around me wherever I traveled to. After a year of researching drones, saving, reading reviews, and seeing what was offered, I pre-ordered a Mavic 2 Pro from DJI. It was the newest and best consumer drone hitting the market back in the Fall of 2018. I like to offer prints from my travels in and outside of Ohio. Someday, it would be an honor to work for farmers, realtors, construction companies and the general public to capture their newly purchased home or aerial shots of select areas during different seasons. I have a past background of customer service from past jobs in my years and I would do my best to make sure they’re happy and make their wishes with photos happen.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
My followers on social media and people out in public. So many people supporting what I do and I greatly appreciate it. If people didn’t like my work, then I would be less inclined to continue to do what I do or share what I capture on my many journeys. I get a lot of praise online, but when someone approaches me in public and tells me how much they enjoy my work, it makes me happy. There are many folks who aren’t able to get out any longer and they have told me how they appreciate seeing what’s going on in the outside world through my photos.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I would love to start a business down the road and grow it. Photos capture memories, history, and events and to give everyone a bird’s-eye view makes the photos I provide unique.
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