Category Archives: Aerial Photography

Aerial Photography, Drone Flying Tips, flying, Story

11. Into the Bloom – Part II

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Previously: Catching a blooming cacti – part I

I knew that skipping a couple of weeks will pose a problem for finding blooming cacti but it was better than nothing. So ,two weeks later, with a fixed gimbal and much more motivation I went on to continue my hunt for last-chance of a blooming cacti.

Riding all the way east on Via Linda I found a trail that I heard of before, The Sunrise Trail but being the lazy fat dude I am, I’ve never got here for the same reasons as some of my healthier friends did. My friends are usually sending slefies from the top of this trail at 5am in the morning, which is about 2 hours after I went to sleep…

But now that I have my flying proxy to do the hard work for me, all I have to do is climb the trail just enough to be able to see where my quad is, so I can get a good idea of how to fly it…

Starting the usual pre-flight checks:

  • Power? On
  • GPS? On
  • Status lights? Blinking Green
  • Camera? Rolling
  • Remote switches? Check
  • Visual examination? … FAIL!

It seems that one of the landing gear legs has a serious dent, nothing too crazy but enough to make a mental note to self: need to order a new landing gear.

We are ready to go…

Starting the engines, pushing the throttle stick up… and off we go…

The heat is even higher this late afternoon, than two weeks ago, and my ability to control the drone is diminished dramatically…

Nevertheless I manage to fly it towards the top of the mountain so that I can also take a selfie of my own…

selfie-sunrise-trail

And off we go to find what I came here for… some blooming cacti….

I spot a couple of them, trying to fly towards them and have some interesting shots, hoping to not lose my drone down the creek that hosts the only two blooming cacti I was able to spot.

I manage to maneuver towards one of them, while hopefully capturing some nice ascending and descending flight shots over the creek.

Despite the hot weather that, as I already mentioned, makes it hard to control the quad, I decide to do something crazy and fly it in between the two “hands” of the cactus. I approach it “smoothly” trying to stay focused on the blooming flowers while flying through the cactus’ structure, and… BOOM, BOOM, BANG!

I hit the cactus. Now, I’m at the grace of the stabilizing software to take me out of this situation without going down the creek to search for my quad. Best acquired instinct at this point is to “let go” of the controls and see if it can adjust itself…

Few more bounces into the cactus and, it flies out of the risky area and is free again.

I resume control over the drone, take some additional shots and bringing it back for landing just before it runs out of juice.

Second round  of juice is loaded and I’m trying to take off again…

And then this happens

I have no idea why but a quick look at it shows that the only damage is that same broken landing leg which got a bit loser, but still  attached “enough” to the quad, so I give it a thumbs-up to keep flying.

Set it for a second take off and this time we are good.

I empty the battery and drive up to the other side of the road to take my final set of shots down in the bigger creek on the southern side of the access road.

While I was prepping the drone for take off, I was proud of myself for the amount of walking I did to get to the bottom of the creek. With a huge smile on my face and even huger sweat spot on my shirt, I’m starting the motors and bring the quad to mid-air.

I capture some nice shots flying up the side walls of the creek, and then I decide to try something a bit different and fly inside the creek’s path in higher speed than usual.

I start accelerating and the creek is turning left, but not surprising, I can’t keep up with my drone, by means of running, so I just trust my instincts and send it left while I’m chasing it to be able to see where it is.

Before I know it, it runs into a crowded pile of dead trees and dry bushes and makes a grand flip and crashes into the floor.

My first real crash since I started flying this toy.

I find my way through the dry shrubs hoping to not make this my first official meeting with one of the local residents of the desert, the rattle snake…

I’m making sure my phone is within reach, just in case I need to make an emergency call… and I’m digging in to grab my quad, which is laying on its back with the gimbal helplessly attempting to stabilize the camera, which makes it look like as if the quad is gasping for air and the camera is its pounding heart…

I pick it up,  while cursing a bit, quick inspection, the battery door is open and the dented leg looks even worse than before… no doubt I’ll need a new landing gear. I walk it back to a safer place, put it back on its 3.5 legs and try to fly it for the last time, before I’m out of juice.

I get some last shots of a couple of other cacti that had some final touches of blooming flowers, and we are out of juice…

By the time I got home the landing gear was barely attached to the drone.

2014-10-19 10.17.37

Ok, Amazon, here I come: A new Landing Skid is on its way…

So here is the last take of blooming cacti I could get before it was too late…

 

 

 

Aerial Photography, flying, Story, Technical

10. Into the Bloom – Part I

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Previously: Dealing with the fear of water

Ever since my last fly over the water of lake Margruite in Scottsdale, I was looking for my next opportunity to fly.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to do that for four weeks.

Don’t get me wrong, I did have the intention and made the necessary plans, but ‘reality’ was not on my side (no, ‘reality’ is not how I call my wife and daughter…).

I even brought my drone with me to our short trip to LA hoping to catch some nice views…

20140519-153013-55813370.jpg
My drone stayed put the entire round trip until we got back from LA. Well, almost in the same position. 5 minutes into the ride my daughter informed me that if this “thing” in the back seat will not stop “clicking”, she will teach it how to fly out the window, so I had to stop and rearrange the bungee cords to hold the gimbal in place so its metal parts stop hitting each other in loud metallic sound.

During the visit, every time I dared to think: “This is the perfect time to fly it”, either my wife or my daughter (I guess I do call them ‘reality’) had a convincing reason for why I shouldn’t stop the car to fly it at that specific moment.

I really wanted to fly it next to the power windmills in Palm Springs but,  “surprisingly”, the winds in the area were too strong (now I know why they chose this area to install them) and it was too cloudy to get a good picture anyhow.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Of course this is when my wife and daughter said it would be ok if I’ll fly it now… twisted reality…

When we got back home, I had to crawl into the back of the car to detach the poor plastic bird off the back seat and bring it home, without giving it a chance to fly during the entire trip.

I felt like I have to correct this, so the following Sunday, I cleared my schedule to find the time to fly it.

By the time I got things going it was close to noon. In the desert, ‘close to noon’ during summer can mean 3 digits temperatures of about ~104ºF (~ 40ºC for my metric friends), but this mid-May  Sunday noon was already showing these high temperatures earlier than expected.

The good news about this time of year in the desert is that you get to watch the blooming of the cacti. If you never seen a blooming cactus, you better not say you lived in the desert. This is one of the most beautiful phenomenons of the desert view. Seeing these tall Sonora Saguaro cacti rising to an impressive 40-60 feet (12-18m), with a bright cluster of flowers at the top, is one surprise  that is waiting for any new desert resident (sorry for ruining the surprise to any future desert residents…)

So I decided to dedicate my next shooting to this beautiful act of nature.

Finding cacti in the desert is quite easy, you just need to walk in any direction for 5 minutes and you’ll hit one. But finding a blooming one can be quite tricky if you missed the peak of the season which last only a few weeks, which of course is what happened to me.

So I’m in my car, scouting for blooming cacti and as I drive I notice a few on side of Frank Lloyd Wright road just a few miles before it ends.

I stopped my car in one of the first exits, and got ready to fly.

Quick pre-flight check:

  • RC On: Check
  • GPS ON: Check
  • IOC Off: Check
  • GoPro On: Check
  • GoPro Recording: Check
  • Battery plugged: Check
  • 6-tone sound effect: Check
  • Gimbal stabilized: Check …. Uncheck…. FAIL!

I scratch my head, why is my camera pointing to the floor? oh… maybe the tilt control is down…

  • Tilt Control up: Check
  • Gimbal Stabilized: FAIL!

$H1T! what do I do? Like any good software engineer, I look for the quickest way to: “restart”… Now I understand why they have this little plug between the gimbal and the quad, so I can reset it by quickly unplugging and plugging it back in.

I unplug, count to 5 (like in any troubleshooting guide) and plug it back in.

A second later the gimbal does its initialization and the camera is …. stable… well sort of…. but stable enough for me to fly it…. I know that something is wrong but I don’t know what yet…

I run a quick pre-flight-check again, all seems good, except for the crooked camera, but hey, these flowers will not wait for ever….

I take off, flying over FLW trying to get to the cacti on the other side of the road, having the worst angle to do any decent guessing on the actual position of the camera relative to the one cacti that is blooming, but hey, I’m thinking of all the poor people who are actually hiking in this weather, and I’m immediately appreciative of the easy hobby I chose.

The entire flight the drone is “fighting” my attempts to control it, although the wind is very light, and it reminds me of the times when my children were 3 yrs old and I was trying to convince them that it is time to go back home from the park, while they keep running through my fingers and returning to the swings…

Without any other option I force the drone to land next to me, and we are off. I could swear that the flight time was shorter than usual but I’m not sure. I get to the drone, picking it up from one of its arms, turn the GoPro off, and I realized an overwhelming sharp burn in my arm. I almost dropped my baby before I realized my arm touched one of the motors. It took me less than 1 second to realize what happened. The motors had their first ‘welcome to Arizona’ flight ever, and they didn’t like the heat, so they were fighting back by producing counter heat! That was HOT!

I kept looking for more cacti to shoot, found a couple of other locations and since one of them was next to a nice green area, I decided to use it to practice some flight maneuvers in that area.

I realized that shooting without watching what you shoot, brings us back to the old film days where you had to wait for your film to be developed before you could watch it. So, when I got back home and went through the ‘digital development process’ (copying the files to my computer) I could finally review my footage.

The good news, no “burnt-film on my memory card”, but the bad news were that there was a reason to my bird’s madness. It seems that my gimbal over-rotated and got its wires tangled which caused its motors to over-fight gravity.

gimbal-tangled-wires

This explains it all… The Gimbal’s brain was trying endlessly to adjust the camera, but the motors got blocked by the wires and therefore the camera kept rattling and the footage came out fuzzy and jumpy.

I managed to get only a few seconds of stable video… nothing close to what I wanted… but here you go…

Luckily I had about one more week before it is too late to find the blooming cacti… maybe next week would be more successful?

 

Continue to part 2

 

Aerial Photography, Drone Flying Tips, flying, Technical

9. Brave over water

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Previously: the boulders of north-north Scottsdale

After a very busy week, where I couldn’t find the time to take my drone to breath some air, I finally was able to find some time this nice Saturday to enjoy a fun shot.

Realizing that covering too many spots in a single fly is not my thing, I’ve decided to return to my usual style of longer shots in fewer places.

As usual I got into my car before I even know where I’m heading.

I had some time to think about it as I headed for my monthly haircut at my favorite European Barbershop. I was excited as I parked my car sneaking a pick into the shop as I saw no line. By the time I got to the door, a quicker dude beat me to it, so I had even more time to think.

I kept reading about the external battery mounts to see if I can extend the flying time. All of my reading convinced me that the extra weight will not give me much more flying time per run, will overheat my motors and will increase my chances of crashing my drone…

I decided to give up on this for now. Maybe I should just get more batteries so I have more than 3 rotations.

I also noticed that flying time is almost identical with the 2200 mAh and the 2700 mAh batteries I have, while theoriginal  2200 mAh are better fitted into the battery housing… so probably I should stick to the original battery packs when I decided to buy additional juice power.

With my new haircut, I was ready to hit the road but with all the reading and the NBA playoff tip-off in front of me at the barbershop, I did not make up my mind yet .

As I backed out of my parking lot, my mind was set… the Margruite Lake in Scottsdale, not far from the crossing of Via de Ventura and Hayden road, and no, I didn’t know this is how it is called until I started writing this post, so don’t worry if you didn’t know the name.

This is also where my favorite coffee shop is, Altitude Coffee Lab, where I buy my coffee beans to make my favorite drink before I leave home every morning.

Since I started shooting video with the drone, I realized that every time I’m driving my car, I’m constantly in “recce” mode, trying to figure out if I want to film here and how will this shot will look from my flying camera.

This lake was on my mental list for quite some time now. It is located on the nice greenbelt,  11 miles of continuous biking pathway starting at Shea & 101 hwy all the way down to Tempe lake, and has some nice visual features.

This specific point on the path has a very nice view, a water fountain and a wide lake. In addition it has a lot of activity which I wanted to capture in my video, such as bikers, joggers and sometime even some in-lake activity…

As with any busy spot, people were drawn to my drone like flies to a purple light. The moment I placed it on the ground to run through my  pre-flight checks and plugging the batteries, people gathered around starting to ask questions.

I was mostly concerned with all the dogs around, after my bad experience in my 2nd flight at the McDowell mountain area…

My mental shot plan was, to break my 21 minutes of shots into three styles:

One would be along the bike path with some slides away to the sides or vertically. The other would be over the water and around the water fountain and the 3rd would be a high altitude set of shots to capture the beauty of the entire lake.

With the excitement of the people around me, and with all the Q&A sessions I ran through, I didn’t get to capture all that I wanted, but I did have a few breakthroughs today.

I was able to perform much more complicated flight maneuvers while staying under 5 feet from the ground, and I was able to control the camera’s tilt in a smoother way than usual (I learned how to hold the tilt control at the back of my RC more firmly and slide it slowly while keeping the grip of it as strong as I could).

The attention of the people was amazing, they were all waving at the camera, even the dogs didn’t freak out, which is good because I didn’t want to see anyone being dragged into the lake by their dog because of me…

As always I was looking for extending my trust in myself and my flying skills. I decided to fly the drone relatively low over the water, close to the fountain, and also try to cover the entire lake distance.

This is one of these moments where you have to train your brain to stop thinking on the “what if” and trust that the drone will come back to you in one piece, although every time you read the stories of experienced drone owners, they have their fair share of stories of drones that decide to go on their own, crashing into water and other kinds of drone-takes-control-of-its-own-destiny situations, occasionally  ending up with a lost or damaged-beyond-repair equipment…

The thing that works for me in these situations is to forget how much it cost me to build this flying toy, and to get in-the-zone and focus on enjoying the act of flying and doing my best guessing what does my drone see, vs what I think it captures and how to avoid basic mistakes of running into trees or buildings…

As always, my eyes were deceiving me and fooling my judgment. I was attempting to do a full lake flight and shoot it from its north side, but was barely two thirds of the way over the lake before I turned it back, thinking it is already beyond the water line. Despite this repeating mistake, it was still the farthest I have ever flown my mechanical bird, and the views ended up quite amazing.

I was mostly impressed with the beauty of the reflection of the skies and clouds over the lake as I was speeding over it.

The light wind was not too helpful, but at the same time was not enough to cause any problems except for some shakiness at times, mostly during the fast high altitude fights…

Editing this video was the hardest one so far just because of my attempt to keep the video at the 2 minutes mark, while I had good material for at least 8 minutes of video out of the 21 minutes of footage… but let these be my problems…

Enjoy the “viewdeo”

 

Aerial Photography, Drone Flying Tips, flying, Story

8. Behind the Boulder

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Previously: Flying old-town Scottsdale

I woke up Sunday morning ready for my upcoming flight. I was not 100% sure where will it be, but I started to form a general idea and guideline for my upcoming videos: I want to stay within Scottsdale for now, challenging myself to make the most out of my city.

This time I made sure, during the night before, that everything is ready so I’m not getting nervous early morning before I got my coffee shot.

I prepared my cappuccino in a to-go cup  and was ready to hit the road… going someplace… where? I don’t know yet, but it will be in Scottsdale, that’s for sure.

Trunk Ready to go
My trunk ready to go (I found out that putting the drone on its back is the safest way to travel with it)

I loaded my stuff to the car, after I took the picture the coffee called “shotgun” so I took it with me to the front.

As I started the car, my gut decided for me on where to drive to.

I’ve been directed to go to the most north point of Scottsdale I know of, “The Boulders” at the edge of Scottsdale road.

As I was driving over, my mind was picturing the shots I wanted to take of the big boulders there.

As usual, plans are nice, but reality changes them every moment. It seems that the starting point I had in mind was not possible as it was just next to the security gate of the boulder’s resort.

Going back I found a good alternative starting point. Early on a Sunday morning, the little shopping area south of the boulder was deserted and was a perfect second option.

I parked my car, took a quick sip from my cappuccino and within less than 2 minutes my flying camera/toy was in mid air, fighting some unexpected wind. It was way more windy than I had hoped for, and my drone was jumpy, to say the least.

7 minutes later it landed safely and I continued thinking of my next point of view for the next battery run. I decided to go to the north side of the boulder and get a nice shot from that side.

I found a small road that goes behind the boulder with a good parking area next to the road.

This ended up being my best guess/decision of the day.

My starting point had a small boulder of its own and some typical desert habitat with a tall cacti and various other common desert plants.

In my mind I saw how I take a shot of flying really close to the small boulder, rapidly elevating to reveal the huge boulder a bit south of my current point.  My surprise was much bigger when I got home and reviewed my footage. Actually I had three surprises, two bad and one good. On the bad side, the sun decided to kill my shots with these annoying dark scanning lines over my footage, and my drone was not pointing at the right direction to reveal the big boulder. But on the positive side, to my surprise I discovered an amazing golf course that was laying just behind the small boulder.

small-boulder-ground-view
The view that I saw from the ground
The view from the drone behind the boulder
The view revealed by the drone after flying above the small boulder

Since I had no idea what is the actual bird’s-eye view, while shooting, but as  I knew of some golf courses of the resort in the area, I’ve decided to be brave and fly it far from me, the farthest I have ever allowed myself, where I could barely see the drone, and fly it around the entire area.

I covered some nice air-ground and as I felt the battery was nearing its end, I pulled it closer and decided to drain the battery closer to me and low enough so in case it dies, it doesn’t fall from too high. This led to one beautiful, and lucky, shot as I was flying just above the road at 15′ when a convertible with an open top drove just under my drone and the passengers were so excited, waving at it.

I  did some additional flying over the local habitat and drained the battery completely into a safe and nice landing.

Next I looked for some long shots of the boulder, and yet again, parked at the side of the road, this time the Carefree hwy road, to get my desired view, not even close to be able to guess what will my camera catch once in higher altitude.

Although the angles of all my shots ended up amazing, and I got some great shots flying over the cars on the hwy just under the camera, the one thing that killed them all was these annoying lines over the picture, as most of these shots were facing the sun.

I need to figure out if there is a camera setting that will do a better job against these annoying lines. The main problem with them is not their existence as much the fact they are running over the picture in steady direction and therefore can’t be ignored when it is a video, although you can barely see them in a single frame snapshot…

Example of lines artifact against the sun (notice also a fly caught on tape as well)
Example of lines artifact against the sun (notice also a fly caught on tape as well)

Enjoy the short outcome…

Lessons learned

  • What you can’t see, can still hurt you, like wind, picture was really shaky
  • Always expect surprises when shooting without a FPV feed
  • Flying against the sun will produce annoying scan lines artifacts on the video
Aerial Photography, Drone Flying Tips, flying, Story

7. Hitting Down Town

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Previously: Meeting Frank Lloyd Wright up close

My next flight was on an early and cloudy Sunday morning. I set my clock to wake me up early, and at 9-ish in the morning, which is unheard of for a lazy dude like me on a weekend morning, at least since my youngest turned 10.

Ready to go to my location of the day, Old-Town Scottsdale, with my homemade extra-strong cappuccino in a to-go cup I was ready to attempt this early morning ride…

I noticed that the earlier these trips starts and the farther the locations are, the more I’m starting to copy one of my wife’s habits: being worried I forgot something at home! The last thing you want is to get to the location and realize you forgot the camera, the batteries, the SD card in the computer or to turn off the oven…  I think the oven is the most common reason we are finding ourselves driving back home to check that it is shut. It used to be the garage door, but thanks to smart homes, I can now check this remotely and even shut it from my smart phone using the cool MyQ remote from Chamberlain, recommended!

As I’m driving, I’m replaying in my head my entire packing routine, trying to think if I forgot anything. Before I know it, I find myself in downtown Scottsdale, so at this point it doesn’t matter, I can just check it. Quick check, and everything is here!

Now I had to decide how am I going to use my ~21 minutes of flight in this interesting location. The filming style that I’ve developed over the years is such that I plan ahead just enough of what I want to achieve but I like to get to the location and make the final decision on the spot as I start filming and letting my creative juices make the decisions on the spot. Today my juices decided to start with the eastern part of this area, knowing that Old Town Scottsdale deserves more than a single “battery-drain-run”.

The other thing I noticed about my filming style is that as an editor-then-photographer, my motto is: “Let It Run”. You never know what your lens will capture and you can always cut out extras during the editing, but you can’t re-shoot footage you never shot. I found it to be true both for documentary style as well as scripted and planned style of shooting.

But, when you have limited juice power that can only run for 7 minutes at most… this causes a serious conflict in my brain. The left side wants me to be pragmatic and count every second of flying time, while my right side wants to “Let It Run”…

After watching my footage of the previous flights, I set a goal for today’s shooting: try to have more than one spot being shot per battery-drain.

This was much harder than I thought it would be. After a few minutes of me listening to my left and right side argue (they both had really good points, surprisingly), they cut a deal that instead of having many short shots, we will attempt to have a “let-it-run” continuous shot but cover as much ground as possible instead of spending too much time in each location, stopping only to reload juice…

With a growing confidence in my ability to control the drone… I’ve decided to start at the horses fountain and end at the 3 mirror-doors statue on the corner of Camelback Rd. and Scottsdale Rd. going through the art market that was open along that path.

With two juicing stops (well, all I have are 3 batteries…), I was able to cover that whole distance with no accidents, no hurt people, no broken wings and no freaked-out dogs…

One ambitious maneuver I attempted and failed was to fly through the 3-door statue… it was just too hard to control the drone in that level of accuracy even with the GPS turned off…

Back at home I also made a decision to remove the camera lowering kit to see if the footage will be more stable without it.

After draining my batteries through this path, I went home quickly to  take my daughter to a basketball tournament of her team, so I will not get to watch this footage until late that evening.

Once I finally got to watch the raw footage I was quite happy. Much fewer cases where the camera didn’t shoot what I was hoping it was shooting, the point-of-view was really close to what I had in mind and the visual look of the framing was satisfying.

Removing the lowering kit really paid back and the picture was much more stable. I guess I will give up on the lowering kit and will do more cropping/zooming to get rid of the propellers, all in the name of high quality videos.

Alas, I give you my first drone visit to Old-Town Scottsdale (and I promise more will come in the future):

Lessons learned:

  • Filming in crowded places turn people’s heads
  • Getting a realistic continuous shot over a long distance is quite unrealistic without FPV because you can’t chase your drone fast enough on the ground to see where it is
  • The accuracy of the drone’s control is not exact enough to go through 2′ cracks, and good thing I kept my props guards
  • Filming on a cloudy day produced very nice picture, surprisingly