A Crazy Wedding Drone Story

Drones are increasingly becoming a staple of wedding videography. Not surprisingly, they’re also being used by tabloid photographers to snap stealth pics of celebrity weddings.

Image: Wiki Commons

During the recent Washington Ideas forum, writer Megan Garber recounts an amusing story told by Atlantic contributor Amanda Ripley of a celebrity wedding in the Hamptons where a drone makes an unwelcome appearance:

The robot flew overhead, Ripley, recounted, as the ceremony was taking place. The planner caught sight of it. She grabbed the videographer she had hired to document the ceremony—he, too, had been using a drone to get aerial shots of the event—and said, “Send up your drone! You need to fight the other drone!”

An epic aerial battle might have taken place, save for the fact that drones are expensive. The photographer had no interest in an aerial battle with the anonymous drone, sacrificing his piece of equipment to the cause of celebritorial privacy. Instead, the pair came up with an ad hoc solution: They used the photographer’s drone simply to block the shot of the other one. They flew the drone so that it hovered directly in front of the invading one.

And that strategy that came, er, on the fly is now part of the wedding planner’s standard repertoire. “From now on,” Ripley said, “she places a lookout at every celebrity wedding standing guard looking for drones.”

That’s definitely the first time we’ve heard of a photo drone being used to block another photo drone, but we suspect it may not be the last.

Have your own wild drone story? Let us know in comments.