my friend does wedding photography and keeps telling me i should reach out to couples who are already booking her to upsell drone footage as an add on. I've done a bit of aerial video before mostly just for fun and some real estate clips but never anything like a live event with people around.

I guess my question is two parts — is there actually demand for this and also how complicated does it get with flying near people and all the waiver stuff. I'm in a semi rural area so not like downtown anywhere but still. The weddings she shoots are usually on farms or vineyard type venues.

I dont even know what to charge for something like that honestly. do you package it with edited footage or just deliver raw and let the photographer handle it or what

Wedding and event drone work can be decent money but there's a few things that kind of make it tricky. Flying over or near crowds of people without a waiver gets into a gray area pretty fast depending on how close you are and whether guests are milling around, so you'd want to be careful about how you handle that legally. The vineyard and farm venue thing is actually a nicer situation than urban weddings where you'd have way more restrictions.

Pricing wise I've seen people charge anywhere from 300 to 800 for a half day at an event depending on the market and whats included. Most people I know deliver edited highlight clips, like a couple short pieces the couple can actually use, not raw footage — nobody wants to dig through 40 minutes of drone footage themselves. If your friend is already warming up the clients and you're just coming in as an add-on service, your sales friction is basically zero which is a pretty sweet position to be in.

Worth trying at least once just to see if you enjoy it. Event work is a completely different vibe than real estate — more chaotic, more pressure to not miss moments — so just be honest with yourself about whether that sounds fun or stressful to you.

vineyards are honestly some of the best locations to shoot aerials at, the geometry and rows look incredible from above. but yeah the people proximity thing is real, ive had to turn down a couple gigs because i wasn't comfortable with how close guests would be during cocktail hour and stuff like that. better to be picky early on than have something go sideways at someones wedding