So this guy in New York has rigged up his Phantom with a spray can he can blast remotely.  I have always been a fan of street art, especially Banksy however this just seems mean.  I love the idea of expressing yourself with a drone but this is just a publicity stunt designed to shock people.  If you want to make a statement, at least wait until you can do something actually artistic.  Make a statement or improve something.. drawing a few red squiggles on a billboard is not that cool.  I am interested in the actual design of the spray paint mechanism though!

I have been looking for a way to make my photos really pop and I finally think I figured it out.  If you have been around photography for awhile, you know the power of bracketing and HDR - basically it takes several pictures at different exposures to bring out all the best colors.  The Inspires ability to do this automatically and store them in the DNG file format is amazing.  When I go to open them up in Photoshop I can adjust them and get them the way I like them.  These look a bit fake but that was what I was going for on these.  To shoot these, you hold down the shutter button within the DJI Pilot app and select AEB 5 (or 3, but I figured more shots is better).  Then you take a picture and it automatically is bracketed.  This is going to be my go too method for shooting from now on.  That picture I posted of Ho'okipa is going to look pretty crappy once I get to shoot again with HDR!  

My subject is the Old Maui High School.  It has been abandoned due to pollution from agriculture experiments related to GMO testing I am told (I have not verified this).  Anyway, old abandoned buildings sure look cool.

Since switching to the Adobe suite of products, I have started to dive into some more difficult editing.  One of the things I have been waiting to do is start making larger photos by stitching them together.  I live about 2 minutes from Ho'okipa, so this is my testing ground.  

You need to take at least 2 pictures to stitch together.  You want your drone to be steady and stay in the same location so try and pick a day that is not windy or use a larger drone like the Inspire 1 that can handle the wind.  Today was windy and raining, so I had to land and wipe off the lens but the results still turned out alright.

I have tried several different times to get this right, and I think the trick to overlap more than you think you need too.  I would try and get 30-50% overlap.  Here are the three pictures I used:

The next thing you need to do is a Lens Correction to adjust for the curvature of the lens.  Luckily this is really easy to do with Adobe Photoshop and Bridge.  The latest version of Photoshop even has the Inspire 1 built in, so you just select this option and it happens.

Next, you select your three files and "Photomerge" them.  You should now have a panoramic image that has a strange shape.  I just used the select tool and selected the most area I could fit into a rectangle.  The result was the following:

To arrive at the final image at the top, you have to mess with all of the image settings to get it set how you like it.  I want to find some presets for editing because it takes awhile to get these images the way I like them.  When I used Photoscape, I would just hit a few of the presets and I was always happy with the results.  Having more features is useful but you have to climb up that steep learning curve!  

Hope this helps get you started making an aerial panoramic image!