Drone Maiden Flight
I had been thinking about buying a drone for a while and after a bunch of research, I purchased a DJI Air 2S last September. The consensus seemed to be that the Air 2S was the best reasonably-priced drone for landscape photographers. To get to the point of making the purchase, I had to get over the fact that there was no way I was going to get a sensor the size of my DSLRs so I would be limited to about 12x18 prints if I wanted to keep image quality high. In addition, I wasn't wild about the aperture being fixed at f2.8, but rationalized that it would be needed in lower light and that depth of field wouldn't be much of a consideration given distance from subjects.
As soon as my drone arrived, I took the required FAA course and registered it. Then I did nothing. For 9 months. At first it was because I was busy photographing the perfect fall conditions and didn't want to miss any opportunity for getting good images while experimenting with my new toy. Then I got busy with other things - travel for work, a Utah backpacking trip, Christmas. I can't help but think that part of the reason I didn't use it also was that I was afraid of crashing it.
A few weeks ago, I booked another trip to Iceland for August and I knew I wanted to take the drone. Certain classic Iceland shots like Mælifell really only come to life when you get the perspective that a drone offers. That meant that I had to finally learn to fly it. I brought it over to my parents' house because they have a much larger lawn and fired up the DJI Fly app. I knew there was a tutorial, but I didn't know exactly how easy that would make things. The tutorial walked you through everything, including the auto takeoff and return to home functions. Auto takeoff makes the drone take flight and hover just a few feet off the ground. Return to home navigates the drone back to where it started and it for you. With the tutorial out of the way, I headed out looking for an interesting spot to fly it. My parents both came along for some moral support. I first learned that it is not legal to fly drones at Connecticut State Parks. That doesn't sound like a huge deal, but without all of the wide open space and public land we have out west, knocking out State Parks from the consideration set eliminated a large portion of the potential landscape photography locations here.
We started at a spot in Chester on the Connecticut River not far from the Chester-Hadlyme Ferry. The B4UFLY app did not show any restrictions in the area so I launched the drone. I was able to get one test flight in and was in the middle of my second one when I heard this loud (and getting louder) noise coming from beyond the trees to my north. Turns out it was a seaplane about to make a landing on the river. I immediately navigated the drone out of the plane's path and brought it down to maybe 10 feet above where I was standing, then had it land. Obviously, I needed to move on from that spot. After getting some lobster on the shore, we drove from Old Saybrook over to Old Lyme to scope out a few spots near the river estuary there that looked promising on the map.
The first one turned out to be a winner. It was a seldom-used boat launch at the end of a public road but surrounded by trees/hedges so that no one could see me flying from there. People seem to have paranoia about photographers and I didn't want to attract any attention in this residential neighborhood. Everything looked good on B4UFLY so I launched. I didn't push things very far in terms of altitude or distance, but was able to experiment with taking photos of some very interesting channels and islands that form part of the estuary. It was a good chance to get used to controlling the gimbal and camera and I was surprisingly happy with a number of the shots I got. With my battery starting to run low and the bugs eating me up, I decided to bring the drone back after about 15 minutes. We checked out a second spot in Old Lyme, but it was a much more heavily used boat launch with multiple signs stating that only boat launching was supposed to take place there. Not wanting to deal with being hassled, I decided not to fly from there and we called it a day.
Having taken the drone up and gotten the bug for flying it, I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner while I still was in Colorado, but I'm looking forward to flying it in Iceland and more. You can see my portfolio of drone images in the Aerial & Drone gallery.