Good question. For us, Christmas was the usual hectic mishmash of trying to finish up outstanding jobs before everything (and everyone) shut down, lay some groundwork for the new year, and even get a few days off to enjoy the inevitable hangover. And then onto 2024 – what predictions for the next 12 months?

For beda:photo, 2023 was very much a half full or half empty kind of year (depending on the mood at any one time) with a lot more aerial photography and video work coming our way, but always at short notice and at very competitive prices. There was a lot more work on large scale construction sites, both aerial and ground based. Such locations can be a severe test of man and machine even with professional ground based photographic equipment, but flying a flimsy drone in among the cranes, cherry pickers and steel girders seemed bound to end in tears. In the event, however, it was the Canon DSLRs which took the most beatings, with the drones having no problems at all other than finding safe take off and landing zones on busy building sites. Even flying around between girders in a dimly lit auditorium went off without a hitch, thanks to the impeccable obstacle avoidance system on the Mavic.

As for the coming 12 months, so much is going on out there in the wider world, with wars, elections, recessions and general economic instability all in the pipeline, if not already here, it would be foolhardy to start making too many predictions on the 2nd of January. There are, however, a few things that we can be reasonably sure of:

1. 2024 looks set to be the year of the drone, at least when it comes to high tech warfare in Ukraine. The AFU have announced that they are set to produce over a million UAVs by the end of the year, which is quite remarkable for a country which had no drone industry worth talking about a year ago.

2. Many larger organisations (particularly national and local government) will still be blaming Covid for their inability to get back up to previous levels of effectiveness.

3. England will not be winning the EURO 2024 championships, but please, guys, feel free to prove us wrong.

4. We will all be back here again in 12 months(ish) moaning about what a bad year 2024 was and hoping 2025 will be better!

5. beda:photo will still be zooming around the skies of East Anglia doing our best to create great photos and videos.