A selection of long-term aerial series and commissioned essays, each documented with the technical notes that shaped the final frames.
Studio History
Cloud Expansion Studio did not start with a business plan. It started with a camera strapped to a drone and a question about how the coastline near Cape Town was changing. Over the years, that curiosity turned into a practice built on flight permits, weather forecasts, and a growing library of aerial negatives.
2016
The earliest images were made with a consumer quadcopter and a borrowed medium-format body. The goal was simple: document the reclamation works along the harbour before the cranes moved on. Those flights taught the importance of wind limits and the patience required to wait for the right light.
2018
Architects and developers started asking for aerial surveys of sites before construction. This shifted the practice from self-funded series to structured assignments. Each commission brought new constraints: restricted airspace near the city bowl, privacy considerations over residential areas, and the need for a clear editing workflow in Capture One.
2021
A turning point came when an editorial client requested a single frame from the Karoo series for a print feature. That sale led to a proper archive system, with metadata for location, flight conditions, and usage rights. The archive now holds several thousand frames, each logged with the technical notes that make licensing straightforward.
2023
The practice settled into a rhythm: commissioned work funds the slower, self-directed projects that matter most. The salt pans essay and the Karoo road trip both came out of this period. These series are not quick assignments. They require repeated visits, careful planning around seasons, and a willingness to return when the first attempt fails.
Looking back, the consistent thread is not the equipment or the altitude. It is the decision to treat each flight as part of a longer record of the South African landscape. The studio keeps returning to the same coastlines and towns because change happens slowly, and only repeated observation reveals it.
The studio behind the work
Cloud Expansion Studio is an independent visual practice documenting urban edges, coastlines, and territories in transition. The work sits between commissioned aerial essays for architects and developers, and long-term personal series that follow how landscapes change. What ties it together is a methodical approach: planned flights, attention to light and airspace, and a post-production flow in Capture One and Photoshop that respects what the camera actually saw.
Architects and developers who need precise aerial documentation of sites before, during, and after construction. Editorial teams and producers looking for licensed archive material with a documentary point of view. Occasionally, institutions that want a long-term visual record of a region.
Every project starts with a conversation about the site and what the images need to communicate. Then comes the fieldwork: checking flight permissions, studying wind patterns, and scouting the location from the ground before the drone goes up. The editing phase is deliberately restrained, so the final frames stay true to the conditions they were shot in.
A clear brief before the shoot, technical notes alongside every delivered series, and images that hold up in print as well as on screen. I work with medium format cameras and professional drones, and I am comfortable operating in remote areas where conditions are rarely predictable.
The series published on this site are selected from a larger archive that spans the Western Cape, the Karoo, and the industrial coastline north of Cape Town. Each project page includes notes on the conditions, equipment, and decisions that shaped the final edit, so clients and collaborators can understand the process behind the image.