Joanna Steidle arrived at drone photography by way of a meandering career. Jewelry maker. Music store owner. Computer engineer. Website designer. Smart-home technology installer. Database administrator.
All that changed in 2015, when she bought a small, automated drone to try. She was hooked — new possibilities appeared before her. A year later, she bought her first camera-equipped drone.
“I was a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none type person, until this,” she said in an interview at Sag Harbor’s Steinbeck Park, where she’d just finished giving a basic drone-flying lesson to a nervous, novice pilot. “I would do something long enough and get bored after a couple of years. I wanted something that kept me interested.”
Fast-forward to 2024. Ms. Steidle, who lives in Water Mill, now has a booming drone photography art business. She is one of eight official content creators for DJI, a leading manufacturer of drones, and is the only woman in the U.S. to hold that distinction. Her video and photography work has been featured around the world in outlets like National Geographic, the BBC, PBS, and Forbes magazine, with her footage appearing on streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+. Just this week, she learned that one of her whale photos will be one of five pieces, chosen from 1,000 entries, to be displayed on a billboard in Manhattan’s Times Square.
She has logged more than 4,000 flight hours and is both commercially and recreationally certified. The primary difference between those two is that only commercial drone operators are allowed to sell their work for profit.
But beyond the lucrative and ever-evolving nature of her business, it’s fair to say her work celebrates the natural environment and people’s curiosity for and appreciation of it.
For instance, Ms. Steidle has spent the last three years tracking one particular humpback whale as it travels along the South Fork coastline, photographing the enormous creature in its habitat. (She can tell it’s the same whale each time from its markings and scars.) She has witnessed the whale’s antics — it once dived into a roped-off swimming area, to the surprise and delight of the bathers — as well as mealtimes and interactions with other marine life, including dolphins. A few weeks ago, she saw a seagull land on a dolphin. And depending on tides and time of year, she gets stunning images at Elizabeth Morton National Wildlife Refuge in Noyac.
“There’s a little pond there with lily pads. When the growth comes in, in one area, it looks like a heart — a perfect heart,” she said. “But if the tides aren’t there, it’s not a heart.”
In capturing these often breathtaking moments, “There’s a feeling that the drone is an extension of myself, like a brush is to a painter. To me, there’s some kind of a spiritual connection, so I ask Mother Nature to take me someplace — to help me share her beauty with the world.”
It’s not always artistic in nature, though. “When you shoot for news, it’s non-cinematic,” Ms. Steidle said, “but then I sell the content all over the world and to travel agencies and real estate agents. And I market my material to art collectors or producers. . . . My work is very different from other aerial photographers because of my editing.”
Some people, she said, “want to make a buck, and some people want to do it for fun.” She flies somewhere in between, reaping the commercial benefits to make a living as a single mother while approaching it all as what she calls an art form.
And it is an art form. So many of the same considerations that visual artists employ — light, shadows, textures, color, movement — apply to Ms. Steidle’s work, too. It crosses over into filmmaking when she uses her video footage to make short films. “It’s storytelling, very different from videography, but they do fit together.”
Some of her more artistic drone photography is or was on display internationally, in Amsterdam, in England, and at the Museum of Natural History in Tuscany. And she likes to enter photography contests around the world, gaining much recognition.
During the pandemic in 2020, when outdoor activity was pretty much the only thing allowed, she did a lot of flying. “I really got to lift people up” with the images she put out into the world.
Ms. Steidle, who can be found on Instagram and Facebook under the handle @hamptonsdroneart, also enjoys educating others on both the technology and the art aspects of drone work. She has lectured at colleges and hosts a regular “coffee connection” with others, particularly women, who are into drones. One of her favorite things is when children write to her with questions.
She promotes conservation by working with the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center in Oyster Bay. She has taught lessons, does coaching and consulting, and recently began offering marine-life photography excursions on the water out of Southampton.
“I grew up on the water. My dad” — one of her biggest fans to this day — “had a commercial clamming business. I’m just a real big fan of the salt air and the sand beneath my toes.”
Drone photography is not the first art form she tried; she also experimented with painting, sketching, sculpting, watercolor, and graphic art. “My teachers said, ‘Joanna, keep trying. You’re going to find something.’ “
She did. And now her motto is “fly safe, dream big.”
“I always consider myself a pilot first and an artist second,” she said. “I still don’t even believe it sometimes, but I’ve been able to touch so many people in the world.”
She still considers herself “a work in progress.”
“I made rookie mistakes — I made them all, more than once. There’s still so much I want to learn.”
“You have to evolve,” she said. “When I look at the work I did five years ago, I almost cringe, but it’s a part of my journey. It’s a blessing to see. . . . I really like the freedom I have right now to expand and explore.”
