Recent content by Ralph thompson

My point was that you don’t need an SFOC as long as you remain 100’ away from the public event (the perimeter fence or whatever delimits the event) its perfectly legal (provide all else is legal). And if you apply for an SFOC they’ll almost certainly require you to be 100’ away from people...

You might find it easier to just follow the AIM, obtaining an SFOC is a time consuming process (done it many times before 2019) and you won’t get permission to fly over the event anyway with a standard micro drone and unless you’re taking very special precautions, they’ll simply require you to...

You make good points. As a journalist, I’ve often seen people walking on roofs while operating a drone, somehow they stand out in an otherwise static space. A figure moving around a grey roof is quite visible. Hiring a couple of well trained drone pilots to survey the area before hand and during...

Phantom (1st gen. with velcro’d telemetry card that only worked occasionally), Inspire (the most amazing drone but sold all the batteries with the backup I1), Mavic 2 pro, Mavic 2 Enterprise advanced (now sold, only purchased for a specific job) and Mavic 3 Classic, all but the latter hanging on...

In CANADA before 2019, you had to obtain an SFOC (special flight operations certificate, similar requirement for flying a manned home built airplane) to fly in controlled airspace (D, C and E) typically 65 pages, followed by about a month wait for approval. If rejected, it took another month for...

Small point, limited applicability, you can stitch plan views of an area with a flat surface. I did the floor of a commercial building that had a fancy tile colouring arrangement with multiple plan views using Photoshop, it also worked with PTGUI. But there are no parallax issues with a flat...

I have a Mavic 2 pro that I no longer use. The batteries were all down to 90% life and all cycled down to zero and full recharged to maintain balanced cells frequently. I’d say well maintained. But in very cold weather I saw scary cell deviation in all batteries where one cell would drop to a...

Ouch. You could always come and live in Canada, as long a you like cold winters. :-))

For those who can, just take a lovely vacation in Canada, beautiful place, congenial politics, great food, kind empathic people and lots of DJI drones :-)

UPS seems to have a problem with weekends in Canada, they frequently miss a Friday delivery then you're lucky if its delivered Monday, Tuesday more likely. With FedEx, & DHL I've had deliveries on Saturday & Sunday evening.

I would rather just take a pano shot and merge the photographs in LR in post. More convenient and flexible, available at any time (don’t have to land the drone to fit the lens) and still have the high resolution basic wide lens when you need it. Saves bucks too.

Its nice to see competition in the field. PTGui was my the go to S/W for many years and it is still brilliant. Its very robust an can create an interactive 360 deg website, absolutely brilliant. But in the last couple of years its been hard to beat Lightroom. It quickly merges HDR (equal groups...

Agree with Cafguy, a shinny surface probably confuses the downward sensor. Sorry I’m old fashioned, I always use a folding landing pad, 1. To provide a clear source for the downward sensor to pickup on and 2. To prevent any dirt from being blown up from the ground and being sucked into the very...

And I recall in Britain in 2005 when it was uncovered that Rupert Murdoch and The Sun journalists had hacked the ‘phones of the Royal Family. You don’t think the Gov had the same and better capabilities for spying on whoever they wanted, in Britain and in the USA. Now it just more open and...

Lightroom and Photoshop have de-Moiré algorithms, you can even just brush on the algorithm using the mask tool and set the strength, they work very well, this is a common problem with lower res sensors. EDIT - I tried this on yr image and it didn’t work. Are you shooting raw (DNG) or jpgs? I see...