Today was a drone kind of day. Not intentionally. I was itching to get out with my Helios lens and to love up more flowers with it, but circumstances (job!) conspired against me. My wife did come home at noon and let me know the sky was developing some character. Indeed it was.
I fired my DJI Mini 3 out the front door and sent it directly up over the park across the road from my home, pointed west. The wide-angle nature of the drone’s camera sort of sucked the mystique out of the sky. Worse, the foreground — which was quite interesting — was discarded in my composition.
Another storm system rolled in just after 4 pm. I wasn’t done work yet, but not having taken a lunch break today, I felt justified in spending fifteen mintues working the scene with my drone. I made an effort to include more of the foreground and to minmize the less interesting sky this time. The final image worked much better because of this. I do wish I had used a different vantage point to launch from as I’m getting tired of this one, but I was in the middle of something at work making this a rush job.
The final image at bottom is a composite of 90 separate images. I shot 30 sets of 3 bracketed exposures at -0.7 EV, 0 EV, and +0.7 EV. I don’t understand why DJI only gives that option, but it’s what I have to work with. The images were fed into Aurora HDR and it shat out 30 high dynamic range images, which were merged into the final composite. The drone was tossed around a bit in the wind that proceeded the storm resulting in some alignment errors, which I repaired manually. I wrote up the process I use to create these HDR drone panoramas and shared it elsewhere for wonks who are interested in that sort of thing.
I’m pleased with how the day turned out even if the cold and the wind kept me from the flower photography I had originally planned for. I ended the day with some bits in the bucket and am thankful for it.
More DJI Mini 3 images today.