Most who have worked in the trucking industry will have been accused of droning on about trucks too much. The reason? We love ’em and think they look great. We love them so much, we talk about them all of the time and we take pictures of them and can’t get enough of them.
One of the technological advances which has enabled us poor sad truck lovers to up our game when it comes to showing off trucks is the drone camera. These have caused a quantum leap in the kinds of vision and images it is possible to come up with and post online. This video is a particularly professional looking example from South Australia.
Previously the dramatic footage on YouTube would consist of videos taken with GoPro cameras fixed on various parts of the truck or taken with a camera on the end of a long selfie stick being held by the driver in control of the road train running down the red dirt road in the outback.
When they first appeared, drones were used sparingly, they were large and expensive to use. The shots were hard to get right and it was only the real professionals who could either afford or handle them. That’s all changed now with very effective camera drones on the market for a couple of grand and controllers which anyone can understand.
This is not to say things can’t go wrong. At two separate truck launch events which Diesel News has attended this year, the photographers were chasing a tree climbing expert to retrieve expensive drone equipment from the tops of trees by the side of a test track. They had got the right shots, but had then misjudged the trajectory and got caught up in the higher branches.
Times have changed. We have gone from a time when life on the road for the simple truckie went largely undocumented, with only the occasional snapshot of proud truckie leaning on the bullbar. Now, we have very professional looking clips edited together and presented on YouTube, or wherever, showing us the reality of life on the road.
