I had a fun experience this weekend. Let me bore you with the details:
Cold winter day with a good clip of wind, I nevertheless set out to shoot a container ship on the St. Lawrence river not far from Montreal.
I had practiced this a few times and this time really wanted to get a keeper.
As the ship came nearer, I took off and headed towards it with a lead angle to intercept it. This took me about 800m from shore!
Just as I got close to being in position my iPad mini shut down cold. Blank, dead! First time that happened to me.
Now, figure this: hanging blind with a 50,000 ton BIG vessel heading my way at about 14 knots!
I did have good connection with the controller and my first reaction was to take some more altitude (GOOD move!).
I decided to let the Mavic hang in position and got my iPhone from my car, fired it up and connected it to the controller. I must have been "blind" for about 45 seconds or so, but at a BAD time! Getting the mini back up would have taken too long PLUS who knows what went wrong with it. When the DJI Go 4 app lit up, the first thing I saw was the ship's wheelhouse just about right next to me!
I knew I had altitude and basically just swung the Mavic around to get at least a bit of footage of the beautiful ship.
Made it back without incident, as I had planned my return down-wind.
Here is the footage that I cut in a few sections.
- Note the wind ripping on the water surface on my way out - it was blowing!
- I lost the video feed at about the 1:09 mark
- As I hung (blind) watch as the ship enters into view - pretty dang CLOSE!
- First thing I saw when my iPhone connected was the wheelhouse a few feet away! But I knew I had altitude and just swung around to get some footage.
I never felt scared really. I knew where I was, got my altitude and just hung there while I got my iPhone to take over. If for whatever reason that would not have worked (or not having the iPhone), I would have hit RTH.
Too bad that I did not get a nice video of the ship, but after the fact I thought that it was a pretty interesting exercise.
If interested, here is the footage:
NOTE: No water droplets were hurt during the making of this video (Pheww...)
Cold winter day with a good clip of wind, I nevertheless set out to shoot a container ship on the St. Lawrence river not far from Montreal.
I had practiced this a few times and this time really wanted to get a keeper.
As the ship came nearer, I took off and headed towards it with a lead angle to intercept it. This took me about 800m from shore!
Just as I got close to being in position my iPad mini shut down cold. Blank, dead! First time that happened to me.
Now, figure this: hanging blind with a 50,000 ton BIG vessel heading my way at about 14 knots!
I did have good connection with the controller and my first reaction was to take some more altitude (GOOD move!).
I decided to let the Mavic hang in position and got my iPhone from my car, fired it up and connected it to the controller. I must have been "blind" for about 45 seconds or so, but at a BAD time! Getting the mini back up would have taken too long PLUS who knows what went wrong with it. When the DJI Go 4 app lit up, the first thing I saw was the ship's wheelhouse just about right next to me!
I knew I had altitude and basically just swung the Mavic around to get at least a bit of footage of the beautiful ship.
Made it back without incident, as I had planned my return down-wind.
Here is the footage that I cut in a few sections.
- Note the wind ripping on the water surface on my way out - it was blowing!
- I lost the video feed at about the 1:09 mark
- As I hung (blind) watch as the ship enters into view - pretty dang CLOSE!
- First thing I saw when my iPhone connected was the wheelhouse a few feet away! But I knew I had altitude and just swung around to get some footage.
I never felt scared really. I knew where I was, got my altitude and just hung there while I got my iPhone to take over. If for whatever reason that would not have worked (or not having the iPhone), I would have hit RTH.
Too bad that I did not get a nice video of the ship, but after the fact I thought that it was a pretty interesting exercise.
If interested, here is the footage:
NOTE: No water droplets were hurt during the making of this video (Pheww...)
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