I took my DJI drone out on the Speck Tater today and had a good time practicing my (very limited) camera and video skills. The space out on the bow between the railings is pretty small so I decided to try hand launching it. "This better work!" It did and I flew a short distance out for this picture.

Peace River

Flew a bit further away for an overview.

Peace River

While I was up and away, Sonja spotted a large alligator in the cut between the Peace River and Hunter Creek so I tried to fly down and get a picture. I found that I couldn't really tell what I was looking at with all the glare on the iPhone and managed to get some pictures of empty water by aiming the camera where I thought the gator would be. Oh well. Flew further away and got an even wider view.

Returning To Boat

Got this pic before flying the drone down and hand-catching it.

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I took my first solo drone flight this afternoon and found that the DJI Phantom 4 is very easy to fly. I also found that I kind of need a savvy camera operator as a sidekick. I set cameras to "automatic for idiots" mode and that's about all I know to do. This one requires a bit more knowledge.

Pond View

I flew over by the pond and tried to go between two cypress trees and fly out over the water but the drone seemed to think it was too tight a squeeze and refused to go through. I guess I could have switched to "Sport" mode and disabled the collision sensors but figured that might not be a good idea on my first flight so I just took a picture.

Pond Spring Aerial

I hovered over the pond spring, hoping to catch its lava lamp-like appeal, but some surface algae had blown down into that part of the pond. The drone's propwash blew some of it away and made a funny looking pattern in the water. I think I need to try again with the sun high overhead and the drone a lot higher off the water.

I'm not sure what was going on with the video files. I played them on Quicktime and they were very choppy, as if hundreds of frames were missing, then it would resume briefly, then skip some more. I thought that perhaps it was a Quicktime thing so I imported a file into iMovie and just made the whole file into an unedited movie. When I played it, it looked the same as it did on Quicktime, all chopped up. I figured perhaps I could ask the guy who sold me the drone, since he's a professional, so I uploaded the file to Vimeo. It looks nice and smooth. Vimeo didn't create missing frames out of nothing, so the whole thing is there, but just won't play properly on iMovie or Quicktime. Oh well, so much to learn. Here's the rather uninteresting video. Yes, there's a sailboat mast on some barrels in my yard. I'm that way.

DJI 1st Flight from Tom Ray on Vimeo.

The post First DJI Drone Flight first appeared on Tropical Boating.

The post Beginning My Drone Adventures first appeared on Tropical Boating.