The last time I talked about drones was probably when I landed my second Mavic Mini in the Derwent River. But just over a week ago, in an impulsive act, I bought the new DJI Mini 2, which is slightly more expensive than the Mavic Mini, but, oh my goodness, is it so much of an improvement !
As you will see from some of the photos I'm going to post here, one of the biggest improvements is in its photography capabilities. You can take photos in RAW and Jpeg, and there are panorama modes allowing for 180 degrees and wide angle shots in camera. Previously I'd done panorama shots by merging them together in Lightroom, with pretty good results, but it takes a fair bit of work and time. This does it all for you with impressive results, in my humble opinion.
Fortunately, the motors have been improved considerably it handles wind much better than the Mavic Mini, which is just as well as there would have barely been a time I could have flown it since I got it. The weather, which some ludicrously describe as "summer" , has been frustratingly lousy - if it's sunny then it's windy, very windy...if it's still then it's raining, heavily in some cases. Then when it's neither windy nor rainy...it's dull and cloudy and there's no point. However...finally today we got as close as we could expect to a perfect day and so I decided to take the drone out to capture some nice vistas around Lewisham.
Apart from this, I've managed to snatch a few wide shots from the Queen's Domain and Mount Nelson, in the short time when the light was good and the wind manageable, although in one case I managed to get it down just in time to avoid the rain !
There was also one beautiful still evening last week when I managed to also get some pretty spectacula twilight shots on the Eastern Shore by Montagu Bay....
As you can see, it's possible to get some quite dramatic looking effects, though it can take a bit of practice to get your compositions right, as it takes a bit of a trial and error to work out where you should point the camera to start a 180 degree or wide angle shot.
Hopefully at some point I will also be able to post some sample video footage, which is also noticeably superior to my last drone.