Drone Photography Melbourne

All of Melbourne and Victoria, at the rates above. Travel inside that area is not a surcharge, and a job in Werribee is priced the same as a job in Richmond even though it is not the same job to plan.

That covers the CBD, Docklands and Southbank; the inner suburbs from Carlton and Fitzroy through Richmond, Collingwood and South Yarra; the bayside run through Port Melbourne, St Kilda, Brighton and Williamstown; the east through Hawthorn, Camberwell and Box Hill; and the north and west through Brunswick, Preston, Footscray and Sunshine. Outer Melbourne — Werribee, Point Cook, Dandenong, Frankston, Craigieburn — is routine work rather than an exception.

Regional Victoria is in scope too: Geelong and the Bellarine, the Surf Coast, the Mornington Peninsula, the Yarra Valley, the Macedon Ranges, Ballarat and Bendigo. For anything outside Victoria, get in touch and I will tell you whether it is workable rather than quoting blind.

What changes across that map is not the price but the airspace. The CBD sits under controlled airspace, and Essendon and Moorabbin push control zones out over suburbs where clients most want photos. Some addresses are straightforward, some need a formal approval that takes weeks, and a small number are not workable at all. That gets established before a date is offered, never on the day. Where drones can and cannot fly in Melbourne explains the rules in full.

Yes to both. Flying a drone commercially in Australia requires accreditation from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, and commercial jobs here are covered by public liability insurance. You should ask any operator for both before booking, and you should get an immediate and specific answer — the barrier to entry in this trade is a $2,000 drone, so the gap between an accredited operator and an uninsured one is invisible right up until something goes wrong.

Accreditation is also a set of constraints, not just a credential. Every flight runs under CASA's standard operating conditions: a maximum of 120 metres above ground level, 30 metres clear of people not involved in the operation, within visual line of sight, and in daylight. That rules out a handful of shots clients occasionally ask for, and it is better to hear that at the quote stage than after a booking.

Equipment is the DJI Mavic 3 Pro with its Hasselblad sensor for anything that has to hold up at large print sizes, a sub-249g Mini 5 Pro for scouting and tight sites, and an FPV rig for close-proximity work a standard camera drone cannot do safely. It is the same kit behind every print in the collection, and the full toolkit is listed if you want the specifics.

Edited, full-resolution files — not a dump of everything the drone captured. Raw aerial frames look flat and grey, and the difference between a listing image that sells and one that sits is mostly made at the desk afterwards. Stills arrive as finished JPEGs sized for both web and print; video is graded and cut to length in up to 4K.

Turnaround is 3 to 5 business days after the shoot for stills, and longer for video depending on scope. If a deadline is tighter than that, say so in the enquiry rather than after the booking, because it changes how the day is planned.

Licensing is agreed before the shoot rather than after. A single property listing and a national campaign are different products even when the file is identical, and settling that upfront costs nothing where discovering it later does. Weather is the other thing worth agreeing early: Melbourne's is famous for a reason, and reshoot terms belong in writing before a date is locked rather than in a conversation on a 30-knot morning.