Ultra-light UAVs employed to take aerial photos of the protest rally in Moscow (opens in new tab)

What makes lower Manhattan different from downtown Moscow? They're both high density urban areas with population in the millions.

Moscow is older and the architecture may be a bit more forgiving for flying UAV's. Also the aerial photography taken in Moscow seems to be around a river and a park. However, there are plenty of Occupy and other protests plus other events where aerial photography may be interesting going in lots of different places, some more UAV friendly than others.

Also remember that modern gyro stabilized, computer controlled quadrocopter UAVs operate with a centimeter precision indoors, so they ought to be pretty precise outdoors too.

Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9cSxEqKQ78

???

(Note: that video caused a _lot_ of controversy in the FPV (first person video) and RC community.)

Re. the crowd: it might be thin indeed—the most trustworthy estimates for the attendance were around 50k people—but for Moscow, this is extraordinary, as almost all protest demonstrations in the last fifteen years or so were of a narrowly partisan nature and had an attendance of several hundred, rarely two or three thousand, up to 6k just once.