Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
We’ve had this video submitted to us by a videographer who wishes to remain anonymous and I can understand why. Even though he followed all regulations (like height, distance from venue and so one) he still got nuked!
The short of the story is that a DJI Phantom Pro 3 got taken down by a balloon (kinda like playing pong, but in reverse). But I think that there is much more to the story than a fallen drone.
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The web have been sizzling with Kaveret’s drone footage of a bride walking the aisle. It is a gorgeous cinematic footage of a wedding at Pelican hill at Newport beach, California.
The footage was taken using a Phantom 4 and it is quite different from any drone wedding video you have seen to date. We sat down with Adam Rubin, Kaveret’s CEO and drone operator to break this shot down.
Of course, no sane person would subject themselves to being hit by a flying drone, but researches at Aalborg University in Denmark used a piece of pork and a propeller catapult to simulate the impact bare flash would suffer if hit by a drone. And it isn’t pretty.
The team uses a 3-meter aluminum catapult that can accelerate a 1-kilogram drone up to 15 meters per second. This is relatively fast, but many drones are capable of reaching similar speeds. The collision is filmed with a high-speed camera at over 3000 frames per second.
The catapult is still being developed, and the plan is to refine and improve it to push bigger drones at larger speeds.
Here it comes… US just created a task force to create a Drone Registry by November 20. Frankly, we are not surprised.
The Obama administration would want all US drones to be registered. They said that this is a part of a bigger effort to “to curtail rogue drone flights that pose a danger to commercial aircraft and crowded public venues“.
What this exactly means, we are still unsure. The task force will have to recommend on what constitutes a Drone (I guess a DJI Inspire 1 is not the same as those little baby quadcopters); how the registration process will be handled; and the timeframe for execution.
On one hand we have the world just waiting for a good reason to shove more drone regulations down into DJI and 3DR thoughts (apologies for the other companies, you’ll get some regulations too). On the other hand, it seems that GoPro just wants to party. And what better way than to hit the dance floor on burning man. Then again, is this all one big setup?
I have always had a love/hate relationship with ring flashes. On the one hand they can produce wonderfully edgy and striking portraits, whilst on the other images can also look harsh and unforgiving, not to mention the inconsistency in exposure.
However I do love getting away from my trusted beauty dish or softboxes every now and again. As a solution I recently started experimenting with a ring flash alternative – the Interfit florescent ring light ($99).
The Interfit florescent ring light is a constant light source and as with a typical ring flash, creates a very unique lighting effect and ring-shaped catch-lights in the subject’s eyes. Interfit’s latest model is unconventional in that it is mounted via a 5/8 inch mount on a flexible arm, rather than on-camera. This allows greater freedom in angular camera positioning, making it possible to use the light in even more creative ways.
This has to be the week of DJI. After announcing their auto flight modes and a new set of drones, the company has announced a critical upgrade to their Inspire line – 2 new Micro Four Thirds cameras that can be mounted on the drones as a hardware upgrade: the Zenmuse X5 and Zenmuse X5R cameras for drones.
The cameras are capable of 4K @ 24FPS and provide 12.8 stops of dynamic range with a RAW video file (or 16MP stills). Kinda like the GH4.
When I talk to videographers who fly drones (dronists? I donno…) and the issue of DJI vs. 3D robotics comes up, the main point is always how the Solo from 3DR can do clever things autonomously while the DJIs need some babysitting.
DJI’s new firmware update closes that gap and adds some pretty clever flight modes to the company’s DJI Phantom 3 & Inspire 1. They are calling it Intelligent Flight.
Here is something we have not seen drone’s do yet. A timelapse. Photographer Jamie Brightmore used a “GPS enhanced” DJI Phantom 2 to put a GoPro Hero 4 at a constant position in the sky and take timelapse sequences from a constant position. He calls this project SATLAPSE. While this is an experimental project, he results are quite interesting.
The Parrot Bebop drone has never been quite so popular as the DJI’s or 3DRs out there. It does not rank the same on the pro equipment scale so pros are less likely to use it. Then again, it is less than $500 where a 3DR solo (gimbal-less) or a DJI Phantom Vision 3 are around $1000. That puts the Bebop it the same price range as the Phantom 2, but again, not as popular.
Here is another reason why this little drone may not be as successful as its colleagues, it can be taken over or dropped to the ground quite easily.
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