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Lake Okeechobee, in South Florida, has a problem that grows every summer.

Toxic algae fed by agricultural fertilizers spread across the wide, shallow lake, which is the largest in the Southeast United States. The algae poisons the air, and seasonal rains threaten to swell the lake and disperse the contaminated water toward popular beaches.

The New York Times published an article on Sunday that examined these issues and the plan by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to mitigate them.

But the scale of the algae problem is hard to understand from the ground. To capture the vastness of the slime, The Times had to be high above the water. So Josh Ritchie brought in a drone.

Mr. Ritchie, a photographer based in Margate, Fla., spent four days in June and July launching his camera-equipped drone from the shores of Lake Okeechobee. He used it to tour the lake’s 135-mile perimeter and to search for aerial views of the electric-green algae, while also taking pictures and filming videos of the water, the nearby municipalities and the sugar cane fields that contribute to the issue.

Mr. Ritchie said the threat to Lake Okeechobee was hard to capture because the main characters in the story were not humans, but a huge body of water, agriculture and engineering. He cited a quote attributed to the photographer Eddie Adams: “A photo is good when it can reach into your chest, grab your heart and twist it.”

“How do you do that with photos of algae?” Mr. Ritchie said.

So he focused on the patterns of the algal blooms as they moved across the water, and sent the drone 400 feet in the air to capture the lake’s locks and dikes, the sugar cane fields and the sunrise over the nearby town of Pahokee.

“We knew we wanted drone photography for this, both to convey the size of the lake — it’s huge — but also because the area is just so flat,” Matt McCann, a photo editor at The Times who worked with Mr. Ritchie on the visual components, wrote in an email. He added that an aerial perspective helped readers see the lake’s scale and better understand the Army corps’s plans.

This isn’t The Times’s first drone photography project: For example, The Times relied on drone footage in 2016 to convey the grandeur of Mexico City and in 2018 to show the vulnerability of Stone Age sites on the Orkney Islands.

Mr. Ritchie, who has worked as a photographer since the late 1990s, started experimenting with drone imagery around 2018. By then, safety functions had made the technology easier to use and drone licenses were easier to obtain, he said.

He said taking photographs with a remotely piloted device required some adjustments — he had worked with hand-held cameras for decades. With a drone, he can’t as easily adjust to the sun’s glare or light exposure.

“When I’m not using my eye piece, my brain is not working in the same way,” he said.

But Mr. Ritchie’s drone allowed him to take pictures of algal blooms on the lake that he couldn’t see from the shore. Another reason to rely on the tool: alligators. Okeechob-ee is teeming with them.

“I’ve lived in Florida for 15 years, and I saw more alligators in the lake than in the Everglades,” he said.