Stunning views of whales by drone

A humpback whale off the coast of Australia

18 year-old Tim Eddy’s drone footage shot over a month off the coast of Australia’s Byron Bay and Lennox Head starts fairly normally, but then heads out to sea during whale season.

According to Mashable, Eddy shot the below footage with a DJI Phantom 3 Advanced. It all starts fairly normally enough — a lighthouse on a craggy headland, some beauty shots of Australia’s New South Wales coastline — but then the Phantom heads out to sea (with Eddy presumably in a boat not that far behind it) and finds the whales.

Whale watching is big tourist business along that part of the coast and Byron Bay is one of the centres of it, but even so some of the shots of pods of humpbacks taken from directly overhead are mesmerising. And even better when at about 1:50 they start breaching.

It says a lot for the Phantom 3 that you can get that degree of altitude and distance from the operator in a shot so that it feels, for want of a better phrase, surprisingly ‘non-drone’. Also worth mentioning is the nerve of the pilot who has to bring his machine back to a moving platform surrounded by rather a lot of water (and who apparently at one point did fly it a kilometre out and lost the signal for a couple of minutes).

Check it out below and thanks to Mashable for the heads up. Oh, and do also scroll down the comments to see Ronny Hofsøy's video as well as that's a belter too.