I’ve been interested in getting a small quad-copter, also known as a drone, for a while now. But, the high price for something that could be crashed and rendered inoperable caused me to hold off.
There are a number of drone manufacturers, but the leading one, DJI has had great success with their Phantom line, earning a well deserved reputation for producing extremely stable video footage.
When they released their latest model, the Phantom IV, the price on the low-end Phantom 3 Standard fell to well below $450. Once I sold an old Macbook Pro, I took the plunge, er, leap!
Of course, like a week of clouds after purchasing a telescope, it’s been windy every day but one since the unit arrived.
I got my first flight in on Easter, and late in the afternoon I took some photos and video while aloft.
The unit is relatively easy to fly, though the time I spent using the built-in simulator certainly came in handy.
The photos below are from my last flight of the day, taken at the county park on the south edge of Lindsborg, across the Smoky Hill River from the old roller mill.
There are also links to two different videos. The first was before I figured out how to take still photos, and was taken just south of Coronado Heights, north of Lindsborg.
The second is footage of the flight around the old mill.
The photos are captioned, but I want to call out the last one. It’s a composite of 3 images, turned into a panorama via Photoshop. Well, given the different angles of each shot, there was a lot of white space surrounding the pano, and a horizontal strip with no white space would have not been very interesting. So. I selected all the white space, and used the content aware fill feature to fill in the gaps. Have fun finding all the anomalies!
Enjoy, and I hope to post some more aerial videos and photos in the coming months.
