TULSA, Okla. — From the skyline to the Arkansas River bed, a Tulsa man is making it his mission to capture the beauty of Tulsa.
Only he does it from the sky, not the ground... and does it so well, he now has thousands of people following him on social media to see what moment of beauty he will capture on any given day.
We met up with Damon Platt in west Tulsa recently to find out more about the man behind the spectacular images.
>> Photos: Drone shots provided by Platt's Droneography
Platt's deadline is the golden hour before sunset and what he calls the "blue hour" after sunset. With a camera and a drone, Platt sees Tulsa in a whole new way.
"GPS, none of this stuff existed back in 2013 and you had to figure everything out," said Platt Platt, drone photographer.
Platt and his longtime friend and former roommate Brett Cunningham first started their new hobby in 2013: remote-controlled cars and planes.
"The first thing he tried to do was put a camera on the car so he could drive under me while I was driving over him," Cunningham said. "That was a spectacular fail but it was fun to try nonetheless."
Platt soon turned to drones, strapping a GoPro camera on one to see what images he could capture. It was trial and error.
"So I was getting footage of all of the flooding and I was flying low and hit a power line and dunked it into the creek — $1,200 gone," Platt said.
It didn't take long for his talent to soar with a little encouragement from his wife and friends.
"My wife and I and his wife sat him down one day and had an intervention," Cunningham said. "You need to start posting this stuff instead of just hoarding them all to yourself."
So Platt launched Damon's Droneography on Facebook with one goal in mind: He wanted to share cool sights.
"That's all it was," Platt said. "And when I started sharing them around, people came out of the woodwork and started sharing my page."
Oklahoma's Tourism Department is now using his images. John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park was his first paying client. And he's recently sold photographs to Tulsa and the City of Sapulpa, too.
There is no doubt Platt is an artist, though professionally, he's an engineer. He's a computer-aided drafter who designs very complicated systems and makes them simple to see. The same concept he says he applies to photography.
Platt told 2 News Oklahoma he is fortunate his wife and his work both support his passion. He described a recent incident when a storm passed over downtown Tulsa in the middle of his work day.
"They allowed me to run out. I just ran out of the office at 4 p.m. because I saw rain, I saw a light. I knew there was a rainbow somewhere and I just had to find it. So, I get the shot and I go back to the office and I show people."
Is it worth the time away?
"Oh yeah, it's always the hunt," Platt said.
When he's hunting for new views of Tulsa, Cunningham is by his side always watching the drone for potential danger.
"Whether it's a helicopter, plane, bird just keeping eyes out making sure there is nothing that is going to take it out of the air or cause it to be a danger to someone else," Cunningham said.
You will find them flying the drone around Tulsa and other local cities, whenever they can steal away for an hour, so Platt can seek out beauty in each moment. He is trying to capture things in a way that no one's ever thought of or seen before.
"I want people to be FB, Instagram it, scroll by and go 'Wow'."
Most of all, he wants everyone to simply pause for a brief moment in their busy day and know “there's beauty that's all around us and it just takes some time to find it sometimes but it's always there."
Platt even agreed to share some advice for others about getting the best photographs. Here is what he suggests:
- Just start taking photos no matter how bad they might be.
- Composition is key. Frame your shots so that there is no “dead space” in the photo.
- If you can, shoot in a raw format.
- Take multiple exposures of whatever you are shooting.
- Play with the editing and have fun.
- Most important of all, share your sights and your work.
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