DRONES
WORKING WITH A DRONE (Mavic Mini 249g)
Shooting with a drone is a lot of fun and gives you an angle on your subject that is not possible without using a helicopter or aircraft. The trouble is the world is very jittery about them. People who have never used one curse them. So you are up against a wall of prejudice from the start. I wanted to ease into it gently without causing too much of a presence, so I opted for the Mavic Mini. This comes in at 249 grams, so you don’t need a licence to fly it, but it is a good idea to register it with any local or government bodies (in France it is AlphaTango). You can also set it so that it does not transmit your details via GPS to whoever is watching you!. Once you are up in the air at say at 100 feet, nobody will notice it. In built up areas, the trick is to set your parameters BEFORE you take off, this not only minimises your battery flight time, but it also reduces the chance of being spotted. So set your flight path, work out what you want to do, then shoot to your plan. All the information you need to fly and record great imagery is within the DJI app that you need to download. The only downside of this little drone is that a, it does not shoot in RAW (although you can open a .jpg as a RAW file in Adobe Bridge), and b, it has no horizontal obstacle avoidance sensors. But for its size, price and agility, it is one of the best.
Some important things to keep in mind;
1. Always set your ‘Return to Home’ RTH before you take off and allow for the fact that the drone will have to clear any high objects on its way home.
Therefore set the RTH height high enough to cover trees, houses, power lines etc. I set mine at 50m.
2. Initially if you are flying around trees, get yourself some prop guards. After a while when you get used to it you can remove these.
But remember the guards will be more susceptible to wind and often gives an unstable filming platform, and it drains the battery faster.
3. Buy yourself a second or third battery as the Mini only has 30mins of flight time. But most shoots should be around five to ten mins only.
4. Monitor your battery levels. If you are a kilometre away and you find you run out of juice, then the RTH may not happen.
In which case, before you fly, turn on the ‘Find my Drone’ command. It will flash and your GPS within the DJI app will guide you to it.
5. Plan your shoot and fly your plan, this means most flights need only be five mins or less.
A drone can offer perspectives that may be impossible otherwise. Take this tree for instance, I was fascinated by it. It is visible from our home in Cordes but is 350 feet below us and about 500 metres away. But all were photographed from the same position.
Frames 1 - 2 were taken with my normal Nikon camera (wide and tele lenses) from our house. Frames 3 and 4 were shot with the Mavic Mini, but flown from our house.
Making an aerial panorama is cool, but make sure you use the C (cinematic) flight mode so your rotations are slow and smooth. And any frames you take make sure they overlap by 30 to 50%, this will make it a lot easier for Photoshop to stitch a good panorama together.