Thank you so much for all of your replies! You all have made stellar points, these suggestions have helped me gain a lot of awesome perspective into how everyone is running their Mavics, and their own personal operational conditions. This is making me feel a bit more comfortable to do what is needed. I never had thought or realized the fans could stop spinning out of a potential error or physical defect, though this may seem more of a rarity than anything; it at least is still possible and its good to know these things for general awareness!
I love flying the
Mavic 2 Pro, and it is incredibly easy to fly. Normally I would just take it outside and however at like 5 feet while I tweaked with the camera settings, but my area has lots of humidity and rain lately, and is fairly hot. My general thought process behind this was instead of flying the
Mavic 2 Pro in humid hot outdoor air, maybe I could simulate cooler operating conditions for the Mavic indoors with air conditioning at 78°F. Naturally, I feel like colder/drier operating conditions would be safer for the internals than hotter/humid conditions.
It appears the intake vents are fairly close to being directly underneath the air stream of the propellers, allowing for ample clean air to be sucked in. It also appears the exhaust vents are also located where the rear propellers would be swatting the exiting hot air away from the exhaust vents. It is a rather cool design!
The suggestion of placing a fan in front of the quad to help simulate wind flowing through is AWESOME! I will absolutely do this during my testing.
I understand this may be me overthinking things, but I'd rather think too much about something and have the extra knowledge for dealing with any unknowns than go into a situation unprepared. Thinking is free, a damaged Mavic is not. lol Thank you to everyone who replied.
@Otisangb , if you have access to a DSLR, I highly recommend snagging it for a weekend or so! My recommendation is to find a subject to shoot pictures of, (such as an action figure on a table) and run some simple and easy tests through the 3 basic camera controls;
1. "Apeture"
2. "Shutter speed" and
3. "ISO"
Those are the 3 settings that make up the "exposure triangle" △ of photography. They all work in conjunction with each other to provide custom photo results according to the settings you have dialed in during that shot.... (For these tests, be sure the "Focus" setting is set to "Auto Focus" for now. Manual focus is a variable that can be learned after getting familiar with the exposure triangle of photography.)
Place your action figure on one end of the table, and sit down on the other end of the table to
keep your subject distance the same for each picture. Set your camera to Manual Mode so you have full creative control over the aperture, shutter speed and ISO.
Aperture is the setting that has the most noticeable visual effects on your pictures. This is the setting I recommend experimenting with first; then shutter speed next, and ISO would be last.
Shutter speed controls how fast your shutter moves, heavily controlling the amount of light allowed into your camera's sensor.
ISO is a way to digitally and artificially increase the amount of light that touches your cameras sensor. This setting I'd say is the least important.
Aperture and Shutter speed allow you the most creative control, where as ISO just simply helps to inflate light when you need it. Too high of an ISO, will lead to very grainy looking photo, especially in low light conditions. Try to always keep your ISO value at 100, especially for these tests.
Aperture determines how blurry or sharp the background will be. A low aperture value will give you a blurry background with your subject in focus, and a high aperture value will give you more clarity in the background with your subject still in focus. For testing how aperture works, choose a constant variable of a shutter speed (I'd recommend 1/200th to start with) and take a picture of your action figure at the lowest possible aperture, then another picture at the highest possible aperture. Review both your pictures and you will see a clear difference in the background. Now try taking 3 photos of your action figure with a low, medium and high aperture value, and again review the results. Low aperture is usually dreamy looking in the background, and high aperture is great for capturing all of the details of the shot with clarity.
Shutter speed is cool. It allows you to control how fast you want the shutter to open and close, giving you complete control of how much light you want to enter into your sensor. Too much light, and your picture will be overexposed (blown out), not enough light and your picture will be underexposed (way too dark). For testing how shutter speed works, choose a constant aperture value to work with, and set your shutter speed to 1/600 of a second. Take a picture. Now set your shutter speed to 1/200 of a second, and take another picture. Now set your shutter speed to 1/40 of a second and take a picture.
You can audibly hear the shutter "click" decreasing in speed the lower you go in speed! Of course, the higher (faster) the shutter speed, the less light is allowed into your camera which will make for a darker picture. The lower (slower) the shutter speed, more light will be allowed in which will increase the brightness of your picture.
ISO is a helpful tool in the exposure triangle, but you always want to run the lowest possible ISO (which is 100) UNLESS its really dark and you have no additional light sources to help light up your subject. Then you can increase your ISO to artificially create light for your sensor. Think of ISO as a light booster for low light conditions. But once again, the higher the ISO value, more grainy looking noise will be visible in your pictures and will reduce the overall quality of your photos. Increasing ISO is mainly only useful at nighttime/ or in a very dark room IMO.
If your subject is still and not moving, such as your
action figure or a
house,
Aperture will usually be the primary creative setting to dial in first. (How blurry do you want your background to be?)... You then will set your shutter speed to match the proper lighting conditions. There is a little
exposure meter on most all DSLRs in the view finder. You want the
exposure indicator to be set to the dead center of this exposure meter to help and guide you to choosing the proper shutter speed to match the current lighting conditions provided. This exposure meter tool is very useful, and I use it with every photograph I take.
If your subject is moving, such as a
flower in the wind, or a
person riding a bicycle, then things change a little bit.
Shutter Speed would be the primary creative setting to dial in first. Too low (slow) of a shutter speed and your
moving subject will have motion blur (which is okay if that's the creative effect you are going for). But if you want your moving subject to be photographed without any motion blur and looking nice and crispy, then you must select a higher (faster) shutter speed to quickly lock in and capture the subject.
Taking pictures of moving subjects is much harder, but over time you will get used to how fast of a shutter speed you would need in order to capture the moving subject perfectly. Usually when photographing fast moving subjects we don't have that much time to control aperture
and shutter speed, which is why DSLR cameras have modes called
Shutter Priority mode and
Aperture Priority mode, to help aid us in controlling these variables under time restrictive circumstances. For example, if you have ONE CHANCE to photograph a rare bird about to take off and fly away, shutter priority mode would be useful because manually adjusting the Aperture, Shutter Speed, AND Focus would potenially take too long, causing you to miss your perfect opportunity to take the award winning shot of the rare bird. ;-) Over time, once you become familiar with these controls, taking photos in manual mode with manual focus will be way less daunting.
I hope These tips help out a little bit. I recommend learning the basics of photography on the DSLR simply because with the
Mavic 2 Pro, there are so many flight settings to worry about already on top of a pre-flight checklist and basic controls of flight itself, learning how to take pictures of top of all of that is just a lot to take in. Practicing on a DSLR will help you to sit down, and focus on the basics of photography itself vs dealing with all of the other distractions the
Mavic 2 Pro comes with. Once you dial in a basic understanding on the DSLR, it will become much easier to translate these skills to the
Mavic 2 Pro. Practice makes perfect! Also, once you learn the basics of photography, you can then improve your understanding of cinematography with a much more solid foundation of knowledge to work with. Ultimately you will get better and better results the more time you spend with it all.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions on any of this. I am by all means not a pro in photography, but I was new at one point with it as well, and we all have to start somewhere so I know what it's like to be in the dark about photography lol Rome wasn't built in a day, but it got built eventually lol.
