How to AR: Photographing Flying and Floating Pokémon

In this installment of How to AR, we take a look at the difficulty of photography Flying Enter Pokémon or any floating Pokémon in Pokémon GO. Photographing Pokémon that aren’t positioned on the ground can be difficult. If you’re looking for inspiration for ideas for your flight types, check out our AR showcase here. There are multiple options from using the default AR mode, manipulating the Pokemon’s position, and more, so let’s dive in!

As always, don’t forget to tag your Pokémon GO AR photos with our hashtag #GOHubAR for us to take a look at!

Positioning your Pokemon in the sky

Getting under your flyers or even getting them airborne can be a mission. You want to be able to use different angles for more natural types of AR photography and for flying Pokemon, meaning they’re high in the air, but in Pokemon GO they only get a few feet above using the normal methods floor placed. Not ideal!

A little manipulation was needed for the Mega Latios shot above, but I used a low roof as a base for the yellow footprints while holding my phone high over my head (it would have been easier if I did the same). was standing on something higher!), and after Mega Latios showed up I was able to go deeper and get this shot of them zooming into the clouds. Much more realistic than practical on the ground.

For this photo from Noivern, I was on holiday with my family and we lived in the Lake District, quite high up on a hill. The hills in the background were a great spot, but getting a Pokémon to take flight that looks natural enough took a little more thought. The house we rented had a balcony and an old tree had been felled into a stump on one side of it, but instead of chopping it down close to the ground the stump had been left really tall. I used this stump to spawn in Noivern as a ground, letting me see the hills in the background behind Noivern, and the actual garden then spawning way below their feet.

See what’s around you that you can use as new ground. Do you have a shed? Some kind of low-roofed building? Even a picnic table is higher than the ground, so you can get the Pokemon up a little higher. For the Yanmega below, I used a giant leaf on a plant!

Use regular AR mode

Instead of using AR+ or GO Snapshot mode, turn off the fancy AR modes and switch back to basic modes where the Pokemon is in a fixed position in front of the lens. This allows you to place any Pokemon anywhere you like, as long as you don’t mind them having their fixed position and usually looking straight at the camera in an upright pose.

For these two Mew photos, I used the default AR mode, which has them in their fixed position, and used the animations to make the shots more dynamic. It let me point my camera at the cherry blossoms and get Mew to smell the flowers or fly into the tree. These shots would have been immensely difficult with the GO Snapshot AR modes, but disabling them allowed me to get the shots I wanted.

Mew isn’t a Flying Dude, it naturally levitates, so using these techniques can work great for any Pokemon that has a similar design and levitates off the ground.

Broken AR mode

Well, one of the trickiest ways to get Pokemon high in the sky is to get your AR mode to jam. This can be difficult to achieve and a bit of a hassle, but when it works it can result in some great angles for photos! Sometimes when you’ve positioned a Pokemon a little higher, the game gets confused and the Pokemon can start moving farther and farther away from the camera. Anyone who has used AR in Pokémon GO for any length of time will have experienced this bug in one way or another where Pokémon ran out of frame, but photographing those flying and hovering Pokémon can have a huge impact !

For example, when I was photographing Yanmega, they suddenly started drifting higher in the sky. They move pretty fast so I kept snapping and taking pictures as they ran away and that resulted in me taking the shot from below, their whole body (in the shot above I was too close for that) and they were a lot higher in the dramatic stormy sky.

You can try to force this by covering your lens with your hand and kicking the Pokemon up in the air before removing your hand, but the Pokemon will often just disappear from the frame and you’ll find it back where you put it have started. It definitely takes perseverance, but it can be so rewarding!

Check out the #flybymon on Instagram for more examples of using this bug!

Buddy mode

Finally, I would like to talk about the buddy mode. In Buddy Mode, previously in Buddy Mode, Pokemon that have flying poses could be photographed in their landed position as they appear when they are your buddy. So Charizard was standing threateningly on the ground, Noibat had landed and peered curiously, but for a reason currently unknown, those animations have been removed.

It takes away another option for photographing these Pokemon, which is a real shame. It happened in June 2021, and Niantic has not confirmed the change. Feeding these Pokemon a berry will make them land briefly, but the overall animation is now clunky, fast, and awkward. The AR community would love to have that option back!

I mention this option because while it’s broken at the time of writing (September 2022), it may return as a fully functional AR mode in the future. We can only hope!

Which technique do you prefer to use? Or do you have another method to photograph your floating and flying Pokémon? Let us know!