I picked up a DJI Mini 3 Pro about a year and a half ago just to have fun. Took it out on weekends, shot some footage of hiking trails near my house, bothered my neighbors (nicely) by flying over their properties once before I knew better. Pretty typical beginner stuff. But somewhere around month three I started watching videos of guys doing real estate shoots, construction site documentation, roof inspections — and it clicked that people were actually making money doing this. Not life-changing money necessarily, but real money doing something I already enjoyed.

That's when I started doing actual research instead of just flying for fun.

The Part 107 Thing — Just Do It

If you're serious about commercial work, Part 107 is the obvious first step. You probably already know that. But I want to talk about actually studying for it because I underestimated how dense the material is.

I used a combination of free resources on YouTube and one paid prep course — won't name it specifically because I don't know if it's the best one, it's just the one I used. The sectional chart stuff was genuinely confusing at first. Reading airspace, understanding the different classes, knowing when you need authorization versus when you're good to go — that stuff takes real time to absorb if you've never done anything aviation-related before.

A few things that helped me: I printed out actual sectional chart segments and just stared at them for a while. I also downloaded the FAA's Aeronautical Chart User's Guide as a PDF and kept it open while doing practice questions. Weather was another section I had to really grind on. METARs, TAFs, the different types of fog and how they form — stuff that pilots know cold but that was totally new to me.

I passed on my first try with an 82. Not impressive, but a pass is a pass. The test costs $175 at a testing center and you have to actually go in person, so schedule that with some lead time.

The Gap Nobody Really Talks About

Okay so here's the thing that surprised me after I passed. I had my certificate, I had a decent drone, and I had basically no idea how to actually get work. And more importantly — I had no idea how to demonstrate that I was worth hiring.

The certificate proves you understand regulations. It doesn't prove you can fly well, frame a shot, deliver usable files, or communicate with a client. That gap is real and I think a lot of people underestimate it.

What I've been doing to close that gap:

First, I started flying with intention. Not just going out and flying around, but actually giving myself assignments. I'd pick a subject — a bridge, a local park, a building — and try to get five genuinely usable shots with different compositions, angles, and lighting. Then I'd edit them and be honest with myself about which ones were actually good. Most of them weren't, early on.

Second, I started learning basic video editing properly. I use DaVinci Resolve because it's free and powerful. Color grading alone took me a couple months to feel halfway decent at. If you're just exporting D-Log or whatever flat profile your drone shoots and slapping it on a drive, that's not a deliverable. Clients need finished, polished work.

Third — and this one I resisted for a while — I started shooting photos and video for free for people I knew. I helped a friend document a renovation project on their house. I went out to a local farm and shot some aerial footage just to have agriculture-style content in my library. It felt weird doing free work when I was supposedly building toward paid work, but the portfolio content I got out of it was worth it.

What Actually Goes in a Portfolio

This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Different types of commercial drone work need different portfolio content. If you want to do real estate, you need interior drone-adjacent work, exterior aerials that are properly exposed, and stuff that shows you understand what a real estate agent actually needs — which is clean, neutral, sellable imagery, not dramatic cinematic stuff.

If you want to lean into inspections or mapping, that's a completely different skill set. I've been looking into photogrammetry software like DroneDeploy and WebODM just to understand how that workflow works. It's honestly pretty fascinating — the idea that you can run a structured flight pattern and generate a 3D model or an orthomosaic map out of it.

The point is, being a generalist is fine early on but you probably want to pick a direction eventually and build a portfolio that speaks to that direction specifically.

Where I Am Right Now

I've done a few small paid jobs — nothing big, nothing glamorous. A neighbor paid me to shoot their property listing. A local landscaping company wanted some before-and-after aerials of a commercial job they did. Small stuff. But those two things gave me real client experience, which is different from flying for yourself in ways I didn't fully appreciate until I was standing there with someone watching me and waiting on deliverables with an actual deadline.

I'm still figuring a lot of this out. I'm not going to pretend I have a blueprint because I don't. But I do think the path is more accessible than it looks from the outside, and most of the work right now is just building skills and content consistently enough that when an opportunity shows up, you're ready to take it seriously.

If you're in the same early stages I am, I'd genuinely love to hear what you're working on. Drop something in the comments. I'll probably be writing more about this as I go — the real estate workflow specifically is something I want to dig into in a future post once I have more experience with it.

Thanks for reading. More soon.