I’ ve been playing with a $700 DJI Mini 3 drone for the past couple of weeks – an impulse buy – and wanted to set down some first thoughts in case anyone else is thinking of diving in.
I bought the drone to take some crowd shots for an event I was organizing, but wound up not using it for the event. Since then, I’ve been playing with it almost every day. On weekends, I’ve used it for a couple of video newsletters in a row to contextualize and show some local geography about which I’m talking, and I’ve been slowly becoming a smoother pilot with better camera control and focus. I expect those video newsletters will continue to the most useful thing I do with it. It’s a bit of a hassle to carry around, so I’m not sure that I’d ever bring it with me on a road trip, for instance, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
Out of the box I had little clue what I was doing but the video tutorial gave me the basics to get it up in the air. Certain concepts went over my head and I crashed it several times over the first couple of days. I crashed it hard enough that one piece of housing fell of that I had to replace. Thankfully, the drones seem to be ubiquitous and this brand has lots of accessories and sales outlets. I was able to buy just the housing piece I needed and it was delivered in a couple of days. I also abused it enough in the first couple of days that I thought it prudent to replace the blades; fortunately the package comes with a complete set of four plus an extra set besides.
Like I say, the tutorial was enough to get the drone into the air, and the controls are pretty straightforward for anyone who’s played any kind of video game. There are two joysticks one of which controls up and down as well as left and right yaw (which way the drone looks), and another that controls where it is on a horizontal plane: back, forth, left, right. Two dials default as camera up and down, and camera zoom.
Getting the drone in the air and moving around was easy. The hard part – until I got better with the controls and came to understand the return-to-home function – was letting go to really explore the area, then getting the drone back to where it launched from. I didn’t really start relaxing with it until I had some comfort that it wasn’t going to just drop out of the sky, and was willing to send it high into the air and to let it out of my sight. I also panicked a fair bit watching the battery tick down, and it’s taken me a while to become patient enough to go up with a full charge and not to send the drone around at full speed for long periods of time. I’m comfortable now letting it hover and moving around at slower speeds for 20 minutes at a time.
The return-to-home function is a big help. When you send the drone up, it will remember where it launched from based on GPS. Whenever you want to land it, you simply use the return-to-home button to bring it back. It will climb to a pre-determined altitude and make a beeline back from wherever it is, so the altitude is important. Around my house, where I’ve been doing most of my flying, there’s no building higher than about 13 storeys. I’ve set my return-to-home altitude to 70m to be on the safe side. It’s critical that not be too low – if the drone loses radio contact with the controller, it will kick into return-to-home mode and if anything is in the way I presume it will slam into it (higher-end models have collision avoidance). I did lose my radio contact once when the drone was about 600m away, and it came straight home over one of the taller buildings nearby – I was glad I’d set that extra height.
Shooting is very easy, although it took me a few days to realize the auto-focus is simply not fast enough for a clear, smooth movie. I’ve left it on manual focus for all the high stuff I’ve been doing, and am much happier. Set and forget. I’ve put a big, fast card in it and with over 500 Gb it’s nowhere near full when it comes back. The files are simple 4k files, but you can also turn on embedded telemetry. Working with the right software (I used Telemetry Overlay), you can customize the picture.
In Final Cut Pro I’m re-learning how to attach text to a tracked object, which you’ll see in this video I’ve tried with mixed success to track the Carleton and Petro-Can.
All in all, I’m feeling much more confident at high altitudes where there’s nothing in the way to shoot neighbourhood scenery. I’ll keep practicing these, and am looking foward to practicing stuff lower to the ground where there might be people involved. After a couple of days spent crashing the thing, I’m much more confident in landing and taking off, and glad the damage I’ve done to it thus far has been nothing except superficial. I expect as the weeks go by my photography will start to get a little more sophisticated than big scenes taken from 60 or 70 meters up.