I bought my Mavic Air (although the particular drone isn't really relevant) mostly because I wanted to add a new dimension to a hobby I'm already passionate about - photography. I'd been planning a trip to the French Alps for a while, and I really wanted to get some cool photos of my car in motion on a nice alpine road.
So, I purchased my Air in April, did a bunch of practice and research, sucking up as much information as I could from this forum. In late May, I found myself standing on the side of a wonderfully empty Alpine road, a drone in the air and my wife on the phone, driving my car back and forth as I attempted to take some good photos.
My self-assigned challenge was to take some photos that specifically showed motion.
The first way of achieving this is pretty easy - a still drone, a long shutter speed, and a car in motion. I got a couple of photos I'm particularly pleased with:
However, the other way of achieving this, and the one I really wanted to get, is to have the moving object appear pin-sharp with a motion-blurred background. I found this much harder to achieve, and spent 6 batteries and 200+ shots attempting. I only got less than 10 that weren't a huge blurry mess (although that's 10 better than 0!), and learned a lot about this.
- With a manageable shutter speed (I was using 1/10s) at a sensible speed (travelling at about 30km/h), the wide-angle field-of-view of the Mavic's lens means that you need to stay pretty close to the moving object and its background to get a decent amount of motion blur. I really wish DJI made a version of the Air with a longer focal length!
- My original goal was to have the drone fly slightly in front of the car and to the side, to get the classic "rolling shot" look. However, I found this really, really hard. Keeping the drone on exactly the same vector as the car in 3D space was incredibly difficult, as was synchronising the speeds of the car and the drone. This was pretty much the best I got with that sort of shot - unfortunately, a photo where everything is blurry isn't very compelling!
- I found the Air's long processing time between shots very frustrating. We only had 5-10 seconds per run to take photos, since these shots were all being taken on the middle section of road you see in the second photo above, between the two hairpins (for safety reasons - that was the only stretch we could fly the drone near the road with enough visibility up and down the mountain to make sure we could get it well clear if another car came along). In single shot mode, I could get maybe two shots in per run if I was quick. In burst mode, I only got one burst in per run).
Finally, on the second day and with extra visual aid, I ventured out over the road for an attempt on some simpler chase shots. These actually came out great! Unfortunately, there's still a lot of falloff in the amount of motion blur as the background gets farther away from the camera, but I'm pretty pleased with the photos and they do look rather cool.
My biggest hurdle is learning how to synchronise the drone's flight with the speed and vector of the car so I can take more sideways-on photos that depict motion. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and see any photos you might have taken on this theme of expressing motion in still photography!
So, I purchased my Air in April, did a bunch of practice and research, sucking up as much information as I could from this forum. In late May, I found myself standing on the side of a wonderfully empty Alpine road, a drone in the air and my wife on the phone, driving my car back and forth as I attempted to take some good photos.
My self-assigned challenge was to take some photos that specifically showed motion.
The first way of achieving this is pretty easy - a still drone, a long shutter speed, and a car in motion. I got a couple of photos I'm particularly pleased with:
However, the other way of achieving this, and the one I really wanted to get, is to have the moving object appear pin-sharp with a motion-blurred background. I found this much harder to achieve, and spent 6 batteries and 200+ shots attempting. I only got less than 10 that weren't a huge blurry mess (although that's 10 better than 0!), and learned a lot about this.
- With a manageable shutter speed (I was using 1/10s) at a sensible speed (travelling at about 30km/h), the wide-angle field-of-view of the Mavic's lens means that you need to stay pretty close to the moving object and its background to get a decent amount of motion blur. I really wish DJI made a version of the Air with a longer focal length!
- My original goal was to have the drone fly slightly in front of the car and to the side, to get the classic "rolling shot" look. However, I found this really, really hard. Keeping the drone on exactly the same vector as the car in 3D space was incredibly difficult, as was synchronising the speeds of the car and the drone. This was pretty much the best I got with that sort of shot - unfortunately, a photo where everything is blurry isn't very compelling!
- I found the Air's long processing time between shots very frustrating. We only had 5-10 seconds per run to take photos, since these shots were all being taken on the middle section of road you see in the second photo above, between the two hairpins (for safety reasons - that was the only stretch we could fly the drone near the road with enough visibility up and down the mountain to make sure we could get it well clear if another car came along). In single shot mode, I could get maybe two shots in per run if I was quick. In burst mode, I only got one burst in per run).
Finally, on the second day and with extra visual aid, I ventured out over the road for an attempt on some simpler chase shots. These actually came out great! Unfortunately, there's still a lot of falloff in the amount of motion blur as the background gets farther away from the camera, but I'm pretty pleased with the photos and they do look rather cool.
My biggest hurdle is learning how to synchronise the drone's flight with the speed and vector of the car so I can take more sideways-on photos that depict motion. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and see any photos you might have taken on this theme of expressing motion in still photography!
