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One step beyond #selfies: Here come the #dronies

A group of climbers on top of the Matterhorn look up for their dronie.
Image Credit: via Dave Morin

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Every new technology creates its own art.

Front-facing cameras on smartphones led to an explosion of selfies, and now drone-mounted cameras are producing another kind of self portrait: the dronie.

A dronie is a self-portrait taken with a drone (an autonomous or remote-controlled flying vehicle). It came to my attention when Path founder Dave Morin posted the amazing portrait of a group of climbers atop the Matterhorn, above. I’m not sure if Morin himself is one of the climbers in this shot — he has said in the past that “the mountains are my soul,” so you might expect to find him on top of one of Europe’s tallest mountains.)

Blogger Jason Kottke had a nice roundup of video dronies in April, starting off with a lovely shot of Amit Gupta and friends (including NYT writer Nick Bilton) on top of Bernal Hill in San Francisco.

Here’s a dronie by Keith Hopkin (it claims to be the first dronie on Vine).

Not every dronie is a video — some are stills. Here’s a staged vacation dronie that the WSJ shot to accompany a story on dronies.

The spring show at ITP, a technology school within NYU in New York, featured a “drone booth” where people could take self-portraits using a drone.

And here’s a nice dronie from the Painted Hills in Oregon.

For more dronies, just check out the hashtag #dronie on Twitter.