The learning-curve for creating drone videos is much bigger than I thought it would be! And learning to fly while capturing photos and videos has plenty of challenges!
The best news is that advancements in drone technology have helped that process profoundly as compared to my early attempts made many years ago. Preset flight routes and maneuvers are now executed with a few taps on the controller - although that doesn’t always guarantee you won’t fly into a tree or some other obstacle. But presets aren’t the full story as it is still necessary to know how to control the device and do that with a level of smoothness. You can see my failings in that regard in the video above! Practice, practice, and more practice will be the only cure to those issues.
Capturing photographs hasn’t been too difficult. I know my way around using all of the manual settings on my cameras, so doing the same work via a remote controller while your camera hovers hundreds of feet in the air hasn’t been much of an issue. And allowing the drone to coordinate the recording of multiple shots that subsequently blend into an assortment of panoramic outcomes has been exceptional.
But applying photography knowledge to video recording and production is only a small portion of the full process. The fundamental principles of photography are certainly the same, but instead of getting everything set for a single shot, now you have to accommodate for thousands of shots per minute! As you can see in my video, with the camera constantly in motion, so too are the while balance, exposure, and focus! And when the drone finally returns to its home location and the captured content makes it to the computer, adjusting all those variables presents a completely new learning curve. This video was somewhat saved by a LUT, but the video is a very long way away from what I would hope it to be.
Again, practice, practice, and even more practice tossed together with help from the Internet (mostly via instructional videos from other creators) will continue to be the best way forward.
So, take it for what it is: Just a whole bunch of experiments tossed together while learning, with no intention of the outcome being anything more than a little bit interesting!
Onward and upward!