Back in April this year I bought myself a Drone. The DJI Mavic Mini 2. I had seen it initally on some YouTube videos and was impressed with its size and capability for such a small unit. Perfect for the beginner like myself. The camera does 4k video and will shoot in both raw format and jpeg format. I got the Fly More pack so got a cute little black bag for it and extra batteries with a handy charging unit. I got online and did my licence course and passed. It’s small enough to carry around in all sorts of places so you’re more likely to carry it and use it because it’s small and portable.
My first image was of myself in the driveway as I very nervously learnt to get it off the ground and land it again without taking out my head. Then I progressed to the beach where my first wedding photography assistant Chris, who has one, showed me all the basics. He took off flying over the water like a pro. Not long after I got up the nerve and flew my drone over the ocean. At first it was very nerve wracking but soon you realize that if you take your hands off the controls, it doesn’t crash, it just hovers. The next thing to learn was to control it so that it didn’t get away from me or out of sight. If you get out of sight and hearing range you can lose it over the top of trees or it can go places it’s not supposed to.
Soon I was heading out on my own to fly in different places. I found it helpful to plan my shots first before launch. So if I was up at the local lighthouse, I would decide what shots I wanted. I would go up and shoot each shot one by one and then land again. I didn’t muck around up in the sky. I also like to fly on a fully charged battery. On holiday recently I flew a few times without charging my battery and it gave me the low battery alarm while I was flying over the ocean. It was hugely stressful to land it before it just dropped out of the sky.
The images go straight to my iPhone so I can edit and upload them all on the go. If recording video it goes to the tiny micro card that you buy seperately and insert into the drone. This is good too so that your phone doesn’t fill up with video files.
Flying with a friend is fun but you need to keep an eye on where your drone is and at what altitude, so you don’t crash into each other. I took turns flying with one friend but with the other, we just said what altitude we were at often and flew quite happily at the same time.
Some of the images I have shot recently are below. I plan to take it on my Christmas holiday break soon and get some morning beach and sunset aerial shots.
I love that you can get a birds eye view on things and use your phone to compose the shots, edit and upload all in one place without a computer.
