![]() ![]() What's the big deal?" followed by a series of clips including an overhead view of Arnolds Park, ripples of water at sunset, and a surfer catching waves. Now, he boasts nearly 12,500 followers on Instagram.ĭau hopped on a recent social media trend with an Instagram video that said, "it's just a small lake in Iowa. More: Influencer Niña Williams offers inside looks of her HGTV-worthy Waukee home to followers Nearly 12,500 followers and counting on Instagram In 2019, he left his career in corporate America and attained his drone license. "I'd just post and ghost and it really started taking off when I started posting photos of Lake Affect, that big giant floating concert." "For the first three or four years or so, I didn't really think much of it," Dau said about his social media presence. In 2017, he started a separate Instagram account featuring videos and photos of his aerial content to showcase his hobby since many in his hometown were unaware that he owned a drone. "Then, about six years ago, I bought my first drone and that's really when it took off." "I was kind of later in the game as far as photography goes," Dau said. Following graduation, Dau worked in the Des Moines insurance industry but bought his first camera at 23 as a fun hobby and created content in his free time. He grew up in the Okoboji area, had an affinity for art at a young age, attended Spirit Lake High School, where he graduated in 2010, and played college basketball at Morningside University after receiving an athletic scholarship.Īt Morningside, he majored in business and minored in graphic design. ![]() More: How Ames-based real estate agent Elli Jennings became a TikTok billboard for Iowa How a Spirit Lake hometown kid became a statewide homegrown talentĭau, 31, moved to Okoboji with his family when he was 4-years-old. "I've known Okoboji basically my entire life and grew up there and didn't really appreciate the beauty and how cool that community was, especially in the summer, until I got older," Dau said. The aerial video was shot by Drew Dau, a Des Moines-based drone pilot and Okoboji native, who has made waves for showcasing Iowa's largest city and its biggest vacation destination.ĭau, who has 15,000 combined followers on Instagram and TikTok, built a loyal following with thousands of views from his high-in-the-sky content that gives scrollers an overhead look at life in Okoboji and Des Moines. It twisted above dozens of boaters and windblown American flags during Lake Affect, the annual music festival founded by Okoboji native Damon Dotson that takes place at the chain of Iowa lakes every Fourth of July weekend. ![]() The publisher is Prospecta Press, also based in CT.This is one in an occasional series on Iowa influencers who are finding new ways to tell the story of the state through social media.Ī camera dove down over West Okoboji Lake. ![]() Proudly produced in the U.S., the 10” by 11” hardcover, 144 page book was printed by Cannelli Printing in West Haven, Connecticut, with high quality tritone reproduction. My photographs of rural and small-town Iowa depict sweeping landscapes, abandoned farmhouses, grain elevators, section roads, ethanol plants and many more “discoveries” that I’ve made while wandering Iowa’s “back roads and forgotten corners,” as Jonathan Andelson aptly describes it. The book explores the transformation of the Iowa landscape from one based on the agrarian notion of the small, diversified farm to a landscape geared toward industrial scale agriculture. IOWA:Echoes of a Vanishing Landscape contains 89 of my black and white photographs and includes texts by Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University and Jonathan Andelson, director of the Center for Prairie Studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. After 13 years of photographing in Iowa, some 50,000 images and tens of thousands of miles, my book is now printed and available! ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |