Drone playtime
It's almost time to head to Scotland, but before I do that I needed to actually fly the drone and go through some of the automatic and manual settings. Cue some worried looking faces on the camera, a few slight panics but also some great ideas of how to capture different shots. The drone has a number of different options which provides some flexibility in my choices. You can fly with a traditional handset with 2 joysticks. This is really useful for manual flying to capture some great shots of the landscape, although as I discovered the joysticks are really sensitive and it also takes some practice to utilise the different angles at the same time e.g. flying forwards whilst also turning or going up or down in height, which creates a much more interesting shot.
Here is a short compilation of some of the initial test shots including me flinching as I thought it was coming straight at me!
The drone also has built in set pieces such as circle and helix (seen in the previous video) and rocket (with or without rotation) which you can see in the below short clip. These can be set either via the app on my phone, or directly on the drone meaning you can get some great hands-free shots. The drone completes the shot and then returns to you afterwards. There is still plenty of variability even in these settings as you are able to adjust the height, distance, direction etc, for example a 2m, 4m, 6m, 10m, 20m circle.
I also discovered today the impact of the wind on the drone so didn't fly as high. It was quite gusty and at one point the drone struggled a bit to carefully land on my hand. Good to know as I'm heading to the mountains where it is likely to be much windier.
The final test for today was obstacle avoidance. I chose this particular drone as it has good obstacle avoidance sensors which means it should be able to follow you through the woods without crashing into a branch or tree. So I tried it out in a little copse and was pretty impressed in its ability to navigate the
branches in its way.
So now that's all tested its time to go out into the wilds and see how we fair....
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