Is flying drones boring? (11 ways to make your drone hobby fun)

Updated in 2023 by Paul Posea

If you want to get into the drone hobby and have doubts about how fun it can be or got bored of flying the same drone repeatedly, this article might solve your problem.

Flying drones can be an immensely fun hobby as long as you experiment with all drone types to see what fits you best. From beginner drones to camera drones and racing quads, you’ll need to try a few things to find your place in the hobby.

Will a drone get boring?

Why would you get a drone in the first place? Some dedicate their equipment to specific uses like taking professional photographs and so on, but flying a drone is a rewarding activity in itself.

Drones may become boring if too much automatic flying is involved. As much as 80% of drone users who reported getting bored of their drone have solved this issue by getting an FPV drone.

When the experience of flying is more challenging, boredom is out of the question.

11 reasons why you should start a drone hobby

Let's get into some motivation to get yourself started, or restarted in this hobby with my favorite, ever-expanding list of things to do with drones.

1.Get initiated into long exposure photos

Long exposure aka time exposure photography makes use of a slower shutter speed to capture motionless objects clearly, while blurring dynamic ones.

In order to make long exposure photos with your drone, you first need to find a device that can handle it. An example would be the Mavic Air 2, with a camera that has a slow enough shutter speed to yield you sharp results.

Then, you’ll need to install the DJI Go app on your phone and adjust the camera settings. Make sure everything is set to manual and keep ISO at 100. After this, play with the various shutter speed levels until you get the best photos.

Keep in mind that long exposure photos are best done in the evenings or at night. Taking good long exposure in the day requires some practice.

2.Get into drone racing

When you become familiar with the do’s and don’ts of flying a drone, the next step is drone racing.

Did you know that drones can reach over 100 mph? The world record for the fastest flying drone belongs to Ryan Gury and his team of engineers, who built the DRL RacerX with only a thing in mind: speed. This custom-built drone will fly as fast as 179.6 mph!

Most commercial GPS quadcopters will reach around 40 mph, but if you look well enough, you’ll find a good racing drone at a decent price.

If you plan on getting serious about it, you could enter the Drone Racing League. When you feel ready, follow these steps to join the elite:

Download the DRL simulator on Steam or Xbox
Register for the tryouts
Reach the top 24 in the qualifying round
Go up the ranks and become a professional drone racer

3.Profit with cool work opportunities

Developing a drone hobby and combining it with photography has the potential to become a very lucrative side gig. Even as a beginner, you have a strong chance of working in a number of fields.The demand for drone photography is that huge.

For example, you could work as a:

blogger
real estate agent
news contributor
wedding photographer

Becoming a blogger is probably the easiest way to make a few extra bucks with your drone photography skills. All you have to do is:

Go to WordPress and create a free account
Select a template and play with the settings
Make it attractive for the niche you’re looking to enter
Monetize it with affiliate links, or
Sell your original content

When you’re ready to become serious about it, you can build your website from scratch, with a unique domain and your own content writers.

You will need to learn some photo and video editing in the process, but it’ll make a difference in the end product. For starters, if you invest some effort into a free WordPress blog, it might prove a launch pad to a successful career..

4.Spend more time outside

A major advantage of drones is that they get us out of our homes. You can’t fly your drone inside without breaking anything, especially at the beginning.

Personally, I was an absolute homebody before I got a drone. Ever since then, I go out at least twice a week to explore my surroundings. Once, I went on a walk farther than I regularly do, and discovered a beautiful camping place with the help of my drone.

It helps that I live in a relatively wild area, with a large forest around, but I’m sure you would discover cool places in the city as well.

So get your drone outside and be amazed by the wonder of flying to great heights.

5.Capture unique memories on your vacation

Flying a drone can make vacation time worth it by helping you capture unique memories.

And the best part is that smaller drones like the DJI Mini 2 are quiet and won’t disturb anyone. Plus, most are really not that much of a burden, weighing as little as 8-10 ounces, so you can take them with you at the airport without killing your back.

Imagine you’re on a safari in the plains of Africa. You see a pack of opportunistic jackals swarming around a small antelope. How on Earth would you capture that without ruining the whole event?

The short answer is: you wouldn’t. You would have to get dangerously close to the animals and you’d probably scare them away or they would attack you.

With a drone, you can film everything from start to finish without disturbing the animals.

Imagine your friend’s reaction when they see the video. Incomparable to a clip made from a distance with any phone or ground camera.

6.Learn soldering and build your own drone

Once you start a drone hobby, it’s likely that you will become a collector. At first, you’ll buy more entry-level equipment. Then, you’ll get progressively better gear.

Entry-level equipment doesn’t last forever. When your old drone won’t start for whatever reason, that’s a perfect opportunity to learn some electrician’s skills.

For example, technical issues with drones often have to do with bad soldering. You could learn to solder, and I’m sure mastering this kind of skill will come in handy.

Soldering will also be essential if you want to build your own custom drone, because that’s how you assemble its electronic pieces together.

7.Reach the next level with drone programming

What’s more exciting than taking an old drone into pieces and rebuilding it? Coding its software. Drone programming is becoming a highly valued skill in our times, and you can even make a career out of it.

Not all drones can be programmed. If you want to play developer, you’ll need suitable gear. A good programmable drone for beginners is Tello.

Once you have understood the parts of your drone, the next step is to get up to speed with the right programming language.

C and C++ are useful for low-level programming, which governs the way in which adrone’s firmware communicates with its parts. On the other hand, for high-level programming, you’ll need to become familiar with Python.

High-level programming has to do with the actual drone’s applications, for example setting up your drone to fly to a certain location via GPS, and linking this function to an app.

Don’t worry, Python is one of the most straightforward programming languages and you will understand it even if you have zero experience in the field.

8.Experiment with underwater drones

Flying in the skies is one thing, but you’re sure to have a blast when you discover underwater drones, which help you explore underwater environments remotely.

Underwater drones have distinctive parts like a tethering cable for signal transmission, LED lamps, cameras, sensors and propulsive devices.

You need an underwater drone if you want to:

Explore the aquatic flora and fauna in clear waters
Make repairing your boat ten times easier
Collect biological samples from the bottom of the sea for research
Take close-up pictures of fish
Make fishing a lot easier

9.Use your drone for fishing

Whether you’re angling, jigging, trolling or fly fishing, drones can help you size up your catch in two major ways.You can send a drone up in the air to locate fish in the water or use it to cast your bait a lot farther than you would with your bare hands.

You can drop the bait right where you want it with the help of a drone, in the areas most replete with fish. However, be aware that it’s forbidden to pull a fish out of the water with it, according to the International Fish and Game Association.

Ask yourself what you want from a fishing drone. When you compare fishing drones, consider battery life, GPS capabilities, cable range and camera quality.

10.Become a drone journalist

Soaring with your drone above the ground can help you capture noteworthy events that may end up in the local news. Drone journalism has multiple advantages like affordability, ease of use and immediate access to any location.

US TV stations already use drones to document their news, so you could become a collaborator and earn a dime in this manner. For example, you could capture footage of a local event or you may catch a thief right in the act.

When protests are amplifying and lead to riots or situations like the strange state-within-a-state case from Seattle last year, flying your drone to the spot seems a much better idea than going there in person.

11.Learn drone video editing

Drone video editing is no different from standard video editing, but it can open up many more opportunities (in terms of hobbies, as well as popularity and work opportunities).

My suggestion is to experiment with creating cinematic videos of your surrounding landmarks and city and post them on youtube, facebook and any other video platform out there.

You'll find out people will start messaging you for jobs and you'll get quite popular quickly.

7 steps to develop a drone hobby

If you want to succeed and not get your head into difficult stuff from the start, you should use a template to take the right steps in the hobby. And here it is.

While there’s no linear way to a drone hobby, since it all depends on the niche you’re going to use it, most users go along these lines first time:

1.Buy a drone that suits your needs and your experience level

I'd recommend you start with my best beginner drones list first, for obvious reasons, but don't hesitate to check out other types of drones to buy or get into building:

2.Learn the basics of piloting

It's not really hard to learn how to fly GPS drones, but beginner ones and especially FPV quadcopters will prove to be quite tricky if not impossible to learn without having experience in a simulator beforehand.

3.Get tech savvy and learn the insides of your drone

Learning about drones, how they work and how you can pilot them safely is very important. Also, learning the component parts of regular GPS drones as well as FPV quadcopters will make it easier to understand them and escalate to the next steps on this list.

4.Exercise cinematic moves and editing with a GPS drone

If you manage to get your hands on a DJI drone or even a good alternative drone to DJI, you can take very stabilized cinematic shots and you can learn how to edit them with music.

My first experience with some simple drone videos of my native city had huge popularity and got me into the news... and they weren't even that great. So learn how to edit drone videos and you might just love the process.

5.Escalate to an FPV drone and learn to pilot it

Thankfully I first learned to fly FPV drones in a simulator, as it's definitely too dangerous and hard to learn flying them in person. So I recommend you do the same. First buy a controller and buy a simulator, connect the drone controller to the computer and fly until you have mastered it.

Only then try it in real life... but let me tell you this is all very much worth it if what you're looking for is pure fun, there's nothing comparable, especially since you're wearing FPV goggles and have a first person experience of what the drone sees in real time and without any lag.

6.Combine GPS flight with FPV drone footage

The moment you get bored of flying just GPS drones, it's the time to stand out from the crowd and start editing videos that are a combination of both FPV footage (from a Gopro that sits on top of your racing drone) with the smooth and cinematic footage from a DJI quadcopter.

This will certainly impress most people watching, especially if you got some experience editing videos so far.

7.Become a master of the craft and build your own FPV drone from parts

This could be the most wholesome part of your drone hobby, and there's no better satisfaction than building stuff with your own hands that ends up flying because you did everything right in the end. That's why I suggest you check out my guide on how to build a drone, which also has details about the parts you need and a video in there.

Is it worth it to invest in a drone hobby?

Drones are gadgets that will keep you busy in a fun way. I’ve only extracted 11 reasons why flying a drone could be an enjoyable activity, but the list is endless. You’ll be convinced when you make your first steps into the drone world. If you're passionate about flying drones as a hobby, you can also turn your hobby into a career and become a professional drone pilot.

So, the wrap-up to this article is that a drone hobby is definitely worth investing in, since it grants you unlimited opportunities of having fun and learning new things. The only condition is to be committed to your hobby and not let your precious equipment catch dust.