We had another fun day learning about and observing whales from my tiny remote control helicopter, the DJI Phantom 2. It carries a GoPro camera and I filmed everything in 720p at 120fps. I normally don't like to make videos that are longer than a minute or two but I had a ton of great footage and thought it justified a longer video! I hope you love it and appreciate that observing from a drone is a very safe and no impact way to study and research these amazing animals. While we were getting used to swimming around in the ocean, we noticed a turtle! He got to see a turtle swimming around underwater and he went nuts. This was such a special trip for my family. Not only did we get to see some amazing whales from my aerial drone, my sun also got to go snorkeling for the first time. He got to see some yellow fish and he just went nuts (again!) There is nothing better than being in the warm Maui waters with my family! I love seeing how far down I can go. In Maui, when you swim down deep and just go limp, the whale songs are so beautiful. The deeper you go, the more pronounced they get. While I was 45 feet down, I couldn't help but wonder what sounds the whales make when they are engaged in the behaviors we witnessed from the drone. Everywhere is beautiful in Maui and my little dudes love it here. Who doesn't want to sleep on a boat? Captain Ian in the back is guiding us to the Navy Corsair that is in 60 feet of water. Unfortunately, we couldn't locate it. Next time!
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Filming surfing from a drone is something I have wanted to do for awhile. This is the first time I got a chance to get some practice flying around Ho'okipa. I happened to run into a guy named Ekolu Kalama and I filmed him doing some awesome nose riding on his SUP board. This was really just to get some practice filming, and I learned a bunch about how to set up shots and chase surfers around. You can expect to see many more surf videos from my Phantom in the next few months. Anyone in and around Maui that wants to collaborate on cool projects, please contact me here. I have always wanted a dirt bike if I had a place to safely ride it, and I finally acquired one here in Maui. It is way more bike than I actually need and it is a somewhat scary learning curve, but I think I can grow into this bike. It is much different from the Honda CT70 you might have seen around the blog that I had in Austin before I moved to Maui. This is a 2005 Honda CFR250R - the R is for "Race" and it is not ideal, but it sure is fun to ride around! I call it the Drone Transporter. I haven't ridden the dirt road to Jaws yet, but I did take it out to Opana Point to fly yesterday and you can see the unedited (except for the cheesy YouTube music I stuck on there) video below. It was a really fun flight and having awesome Maui Scenery to fly around makes it that much more fun. The justification for this one is "I need something to get to Jaws with" because you always have to justify the purchase of things you actually do not need..! I parked the CFR on a fence post near the public access to the cliff and started walking. This cliff side was amazing and hard to capture with just an iphone camera - hopefully the camera on the drone will show the incredible beauty of this place much better! Maui has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth and I can't wait to keep exploring it from the air. Today I decided to see how the video would turn out even though I didn't have a gimbal. Here you can see my QAV400 at the takeoff spot I had picked out. This is a great FPV quadcopter because it can easily support a standalone FPV camera in addition to the GoPro. I like this setup for shooting stills on a timer and the smaller cameras usually do a little better in certain types of light so you can still tell what is going on. I would not recommend the QAV400 unless you like to tinker and build or specifically need the ability to fly FPV while using a different camera. This would be a good rig to put a Canon camera with the CHDK hacked firmware if you wanted to avoid the fisheye effect from the GoPro. The only editing I did on the video below was to take away the sound of the motors and cover it up with some cheesy youtube music. I think I had a tip over when I was messing around with the Openpilot revolution and two of the motor shafts seem to be a bit bent and cause a small amount of vibration. Good thing the QAV400 has excellent vibration damping! Time to order some replacement motors or shafts.. As usual, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment below or contact me. |
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June 2017
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