When I first saw Aydın Büyüktaş’ roller-coaster-like drone photo of a Train Yard, I knew right away how he took the photo: Start the drone camera high above the train yard looking straight down. Then quickly lower the drown while taking a panoramic photo. 

You’ll see by the 2nd and 3rd image that I came very close to duplicating the effect, but it wasn’t easy—at all!

When I tried to explain to MJ what I wanted I prompted this: drone photography vertical camera tilting up starting looking down at a cornfield landscape while the drone quickly descends toward the ground, golden hour –ar 9:16 –s 50 –v 6.0. I got nice golden-hour images of cornfields—but no curved panoramic view.

I knew my prompt wasn’t working, so I went to Microsoft Bing and told it: I want to write an image prompt that will create an image I’m describing here: a drone looking straight down at the ground at a Kansas cornfield. As the drone quickly descends toward the ground it does a vertical camera tilt upward so the camera creates essentially a vertical panoramic view. The results should be that the photograph looks like the top if the image is a down view and transitions into a low-angle view of the same cornfield. The image should look like the ground is curved and the down view would appear to be a vertical wall curving into a lower-angle view of the field.

Bing thought that was an interesting prompting challenge and it wrote this prompt: a drone camera capturing a vertical panorama of a Kansas cornfield, starting from a bird’s eye view looking straight down and tilting up as the drone quickly descends to a lower view of the cornfield, creating a curved perspective of the ground and the horizon, with realistic colors and lighting, and a clear sky. It also generated 4 images using Dall-E 3 and one of the 4 images is my third image here. WOW! It worked—at least once!

I took the Bing prompt and submitted it to Midjourney and MJ still didn’t get what was wanted. Tried several times modifying the prompt and still pretty cornfields—no curved panorama.

I tried Musavir, Leonardo, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E 3 in Pictgen. No luck so I returned to Bing with Dall-E 3 and continued generating images and trying different modifications to the prompt. These two cornfield images were the only ones that came out duplicating the effect of the train yard drone photo. 

In total openness, both of these images had a drone in the lower center of the images so I removed them generating fill in Photoshop 2024. I explained to Bing that the camera was on the drone so we wouldn’t see the drone, and it agreed, but still got drones in some of the images.

In addition to the two that gave good results, I’ve included here some of the ones that didn’t give the right results but still fascinating images. Note: not all from the same prompt, but various trial rewrites.