The Drone Girl

10 stories

The Drone GirlDronesWhy flying drones near airports makes drone delivery easier, not harder It may seem counterintuitive: wouldn’t flying commercial delivery drones near busy international airports be more dangerous and heavily restricted than flying out in rural farmland?

11.06

The Drone GirlDronesWhat happened to EXO Drones, and why is the Cinemaster 2 app missing? Next up in our “Ask Drone Girl” series is a question from reader Bob about support for EXO Drones. If you have a question for Drone Girl, contact her here . I own an EXO Cinemaster 2 drone .

11.05

The Drone GirlDronesHow noise and NIMBYism are shaping suburban drone delivery As commercial drone delivery scales across the U.S. with millions of completed flights, one of the biggest bottlenecks to long-term adoption isn’t just federal policy (though we’re waiting on that…

11.04

The Drone GirlDronesWhy drone parachutes may not be as safe as you think When drone operators pitch their safety standards to regulators and suburban communities, there’s a feature that is almost universally highlighted as the ultimate life-saving backup: the drone…

11.03

The Drone GirlDronesWhy Irish drone delivery company Manna is going “all-in” on the U.S. When Irish drone startup Manna Drone Delivery first captured international headlines, it was making history delivering hot coffee, fresh bread and groceries in Europe.

11.02

The Drone GirlDronesAsk Drone Girl: How to make a drone business profitable (and escape real estate price wars) Next up in our “Ask Drone Girl” series is a question about breaking out of price wars and building a profitable commercial drone business. If you have a question for Drone Girl, contact her here .

10.30

The Drone GirlDronesSnotBot Evolution: Thermal drones are collecting wild killer whale breath I recently heard that whale breath smells like cheese. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but drones are helping us learn a lot more about whale breath than we ever knew before.

10.28

The Drone GirlDronesAsk Drone Girl: Is the Holy Stone HS360S good for roof inspections and landscape viewing? Next up in our “Ask Drone Girl” series is a question about picking the right tool for roof inspections and landscape viewing. If you have a question for Drone Girl, contact her here .

10.27

The Drone GirlDronesWho is hiring drone pilots right now? (And what do they pay?) Want a job as a drone pilot in 2026? RobotTraining.jobs , which is a massive job board for all things robotics, autonomous vehicles and drones, has been tracking them.

10.26

The Drone GirlDronesPowerus cofounder shares ambitions to scale U.S.-made drones in the tens of thousands When defense drone manufacturer Powerus completed its Nasdaq listing merger ($PUSA) on October 1, it signaled a major milestone for domestic drone production.

10.22

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo