On the 30 07 2016 I meet up with the Camera Talk ( UK ) forum member Anwara and her beautiful daughter Samirah.
We were just about to set off to visit a location. A location which I was keeping secret in order to surprise both Anwara and Samirah when we got there.
Any way just before we set off then one of our close friends ( who we have in common ) rang Anwara and asked her what she was up to this day ? Anwara replied and said that she and Smariah was hanging out with my-self for the day as we were going to
- Teach her the basics of shooting a DSLR.
- Watch me fly my Drone and shoot some aerial photography.
By the end of the telephone call our friend in common was then on route to us to meet up with us and then we all headed over to Errwood Reservoir together.
The weather was awesome this day and the location was an ideal place for Anwara to start learning about how to use her new Nikon D5100 with regards to Landscape Photography.
As soon as we arrived on location then Mo ( our friend in common ) and Samirah headed off to throw stones and make ripples in the water. I was busy setting up drone as I wanted to get video footage of the surrounding area for my Fox Recon project. However, things were just not going to plan for me.
This is because I was facing some pretty troublesome " connection " issues. Yes I was doing everything, restarting the drone, restarting the smartphone, restarting the controller etc... etc...
Once the connection problem was sorted out I then faced an incorrect flight data setting. Which I have to say I was pretty lucky with really. As if a gust of wind would of caught my drone then I would of had a fly a way. As my drone was programmed to fly to slow, which means it would not of been able to fight back any strong winds.
So once I landed the drone and redialed in the correct flight settings. I then took off again only to realize that my video feed was giving me the " jello " effect. Which means the entire flight would now be useless as I wanted to shoot video, but not shoot video that was going to contain the " jello " effect.
As you can see I did not have a good start to my drone photography work. So I basically landed the drone, then moved onto teaching Anwara more about the basics of photography and how to shoot landscape photography.
We covered the following topics
- Rule of the Thirds
- Shutter Speeds ( Slow = Blur / Fast = Freeze )
- Aperture ( Wide = Blurred Background / Narrow = Detail in Background)
- Metering ( Spot, Dynamic etc... )
- Isolating your subject.
- ISO etc... etc....
From here we then moved on to a new area of the reservoir, so it was back in the car and and a quick drive to another carpark further on down the road.
Once there I then decided to give the drone one last go, I knew that my chances of shooting video was long gone. I knew that in order to fix the " jello " effect. Then I was going to have to carry out further maintenance on the aircraft it's self when I got back home.
Now once I got the Parrot Bebop back up in the air again, then I soon realized that it was now acting in a more stable operational manner. So as I was now full of confidence in my aircraft, so I then took it out over the water in order to capture these awesome stills of the Errwood Reservoir as you do see below.
Bringing this to an end, then it had been a very eventful day with all it's " up and downs ". However, in the end it turned out to be a really great day for all of us involved.
Also when I got home then I was able to fix the jello effect in my Bebop Drone, so I'm happy about that too...
Here is some more photographs from my Bebop Drone taken from our day out at the Errwood Reservoir.
