HMS Queen Elizabeth drone photos, snapped during a Solent boat ride

We take every opportunity we can get to head out onto the Solent waters. It’s such an incredible spot for taking to the sea, no matter which craft you find yourself in! For us, well, we wound up in a friend of a friend’s new boat after agreeing that it’d be cool to snap some drone pictures of it speeding around.

So long as you respect the Solent and your neighbouring harbour traffic, it’s a very safe place to sail. It’s got its very own climate, and is often protected from the worst turns in weather by the Isle of Wight.

We were thinking about popping over to Osborne Bay for a quick dip when we spotted a looming silhouette on the horizon. Lo and behold, HMS Queen Elizabeth was returning to Portsmouth that same day, unbeknownst to us!

I was already circling our boat with a drone as we were skimming across the Solent, so what better opportunity to fly a little higher and capture some aerial shots of the iconic aircraft carrier? From a safe and respectable distance, of course.

While flying at sea, I recommend using ATTI mode with no GPS. Be mindful of your ‘return to home’ setup — you don’t want your drone trying to land in the spot where your boat was, which is now just empty water!

For safety purposes (and for the quality of the photos and videos you’re recording), have a pilot maintaining a direct line of sight with the drone, and a secondary crew member maneuvering the camera. Investing in a couple of DJI CrystalSky screens with sun-blocking hoods is never a bad idea for this.

All of the footage we shot on the day was captured at 6K CinemaDNG RAW, resulting in the crispest video quality, optimum editing flexibility, and an insanely broad dynamic range.

And when we say ‘flexibility of editing’, we don’t just mean video — this format essentially captures 25 RAW photos every second. These can be extracted and used in the same way you’d use regular stills, without needing to halt filming for a dedicated photography-only fly-by.

All this comes with some complications, of course! The video files are absolutely gargantuan, and you need some specialist storage solutions and editing tools to make the most of it without burning your computer to a crisp.

We also used a variety of Zenmuse lenses for this shoot, bringing HMS Queen Elizabeth into frame-filling focus while maintaining that safe distance.