Fun With A Drone

Stan came out yesterday afternoon to fly his drone.  You can't fly a drone in New York City, so after he bought it a couple of years ago, he came out here, and we went to the large baseball field in the center of town, so he could learn to fly it.  I taught him a few things, and he got it instantly and is a great drone pilot.  He is headed to Oregon and Washington state to photograph some "Assembly Sites" that were created at the beginning of WWII to take in Japanese people who were living in California and were forced to leave their homes and businesses to live in internment camps in the American west.  It was a travesty of justice - most of the people were American citizens and they were just taken away.  They lost their homes, farms, and business.  He has already published a book about the internment camps and now he is expanding that information on a website, thus he can show drone videos and still photographs.

Here you can see what is needed, and how tiny the drone actually is.  The blue thing is a "landing pad" which the drone can find from the air, and land automatically, if you tell it to do that!  The small rectangular thing on the landing pad, closest to Stan is the controller with two joysticks, which operates the drone wirelessly.

The FAA says you must keep your drone within your line of sight, and given that it is relatively tiny, it can be an issue to actually be able to see it when it gets up to altitude, or gets further away.

When Stan was finished doing his test flying, he changed the batteries, and I gave the drone a whirl.  Here I did a portrait of the two of us with the camera on the drone hovering above us.

When Stan was first flying, I took the first photograph in this post while he hovered the drone in front of himself, while I was shooting.  Of course he used the camera in the drone to photograph me!