When Synergy Construction needed photography, film, and video for their ORTA on the Parade entry in the Master Builders SA Building Excellence Awards, the site wasn't cooperating. Temporary fencing and orange road barriers lined The Parade, and waiting for them to disappear wasn't an option.

So we worked around them. On the ground, we used the street trees to naturally frame and conceal the obstructions. Slower shutter speeds turned passing traffic into smooth motion blur, quietly removing the barriers from the frame. From the air, the drone got us above the street-level clutter entirely.

The result: a complete awards package of stills and a purpose-built video, delivered without compromise.

The right equipment and the right approvals make all the difference — and Victoria Tower proved that twice. JKTP worked with Synergy Construction across two separate shoots at the Adelaide CBD development for their Master Builders SA Building Excellence Awards entry: first to document a major concrete pour at night, then to photograph the completed building.

For the pour, we flew the DJI Mini 4 Pro, our preferred drone for low-light work. Capturing aerial footage and photography as it happened puts the scale and intensity of a major construction milestone into a perspective that ground-level cameras simply can't match. Flying commercially at night isn't something every operator can do — JKTP holds a CASA Remote Pilot Operator's Certificate (ReOC), a requirement for legal night drone operations in Australia, giving our clients confidence that every flight is planned, compliant, and professionally executed.

For the completed building shoot, we brought in the DJI Mavic 4 Pro. Its ability to handle backlighting is a genuine game-changer for shooting tall buildings — no harsh shadows eating into facade detail, no blown-out sky. Just clean, balanced imagery that shows the architecture as it actually looks. The Mavic 4 Pro also shoots in vertical orientation at very high resolution, giving us portrait files that work straight out of the drone for social media, and at a resolution large enough for banners and large-format print.

Some of the angles we captured from lower elevations — the kinds of perspectives that show a building in its streetscape context — would have taken weeks of approvals to achieve the old way, lining up rooftop access on neighbouring buildings. With drone, we had those shots in a fraction of the time, without the red tape.