Drone photos reveal Brisbane suburb as you’ve never seen it

How’d he do that? Where were those taken? Craig Stampfli’s unique photos of The Gap have had residents scratching heads.

Craig Stampfli's drone's-eye photos of The Gap have caused a stir among residents.

Craig Stampfli has set tongues wagging in The Gap with his eye-popping photos of his suburb at night and from high in the sky.

His most recent efforts, shot from a DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone, reveal the area from angles never seen before.

Photography is actually Mr Stampfli’s “default’’ career after he was forced to look for a whole new line of work when he was made redundant from an oil and gas industry job six years ago.

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But since then he has built up a loyal and growing client base — and these days he gets to exercise his creative side for a living.

“(Last week) I was in Currumbin photographing a model in an abandoned house,’’ he said.

“I use my backyard pool for underwater portraits and have also done them at the Fairy Pools in Noosa.

“I do a lot of real estate work and occasionally weddings and family portraits.’’

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He learned to fly a drone (he has a commercial licence) less than a year ago, mainly for unusual perspectives for real estate jobs.

“I took the photos of The Gap because I hadn’t flown for a week or so and I knew it would be a good sunrise, with all the cloud around,’’ Mr Stampfli said.

“The panorama was 21 photos I stitched together manually.

“The photo of the reservoir is what’s called a bird’s eye view. It’s distinctive to drones because you can look straight down, which you can’t do from a helicopter.’’

Drone reveals suburb as you’ve never seen it

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He first got into photography, as an amateur, when working for a Canadian resources company which involved a lot of international travel.

Over time, he kept upgrading cameras and when there was a global oil and gas industry downturn about six years ago, with no prospect of finding another job in the field, he had to think of a new career.

Mr Stampfli started posting photos he takes of The Gap only recently, on two westside community Facebook pages, and was blown away by the response.

“I posted a few and was surprised how it resonated with people,’’ he said.

“They were guessing where the photos were taken and talking about them. I ended up doing about 30 to 40 photos.’’

See more of Mr Stampfli’s work at:

www.stampfli.photography

[e-mail]

@craig.stampfli

@stampfli.photography