Low level over water flight

[saudio]

The polarizing effect depends on the relative angle between the sun, the surface the glare is coming from, the direction of the camera, and the orientation of the polarizer. This is why they never mark one direction as "UP."

If you stood in the middle of a huge empty bowl, like a swimming pool or a smooth concrete skate park, and you held the polarizer up to your eye, you might notice less glare off SOME of the surfaces around you. If you twist the polarizer, SOME surfaces get their original glare back, and SOME different surfaces start getting less glare. If you walk around the environment and repeat the process, or you try the process at different times of day, which surfaces have more glare and which surfaces have less glare, will CHANGE. This goes for leaves on a tree, bright car paint jobs, windshields, all sorts of semi-glossy surfaces around you.

Before you fly with a polarized filter, you should try to stand facing the direction you'll shoot, look at the things you'll shoot, twist the polarizer to your eye, find a favorite position, put it on the drone camera, and fly. You can only hope that the altitude angle change doesn't throw all that out the window.

Polarized filters on drones will remain a mystery gamble, until you can interactively roll the filter orientation without rolling the camera.

I decided that rather than try to chase my tail like that I would enjoy the ND effect of the filter and hope that the polarizing aspect would be correctly oriented by chance sometimes. I don't ever plan shots where I'm only shooting from one angle for the whole flight.

 

[younumpty]

I'm going to Bora Bora in a few weeks and envision using my MPs many intelligent modes as well as manually flying to record many of our experiences. I am thinking of shots where the MP would be flying a foot or two above the calm water for a fair distance and I'm wondering how risky this would be.

My fear is that there could be a problem maintaining altitude over water when only a few feet above the extremely clear water. Is this something I should worry about or would it be no different then maintaining altitude over land?


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Keep all sensors on. It's a risky business that low to any surface. Low altitude at speed generally ends up in tears but best of luck. Hope you get killer shots. Terrain follow may allow you to reduce the risk but I'd be 5 feet up as when you turn brake accelerate or simply switch to sports mode it drops two feet at least.
Sensors will always tell you it's an unsafe spot to land while over water so no auto landing issues I can foresee. Just make sure to revisit this thread with video! Hopefully from the SD card not the phones recorded video!! Enjoy the trip....


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[Andrew F]

It's so amazing. I've worn polarized sunglasses my entire adult life and the polarizing effect is always exactly as I want it unless I turn my head sideways. I think there are high levels of overthinking and uber espousing going on here.

 

[Egika]

I decided that rather than try to chase my tail like that I would enjoy the ND effect of the filter and hope that the polarizing aspect would be correctly oriented by chance sometimes. I don't ever plan shots where I'm only shooting from one angle for the whole flight.

There's another issue with polarizing filters when used on wide angle lenses (the Mavic's has a 28mm equivalent one):
If you happen to have some blue sky in the picture, the effect will vary within the frame rendering parts of the sky blue and others much darker down to a near black..