Mavic Pro - February Chill at Templeton Barn
Equipment Used: DJI Mavic Pro, Apple iPad, Lightroom & Photoshop CC
This past February winter storms blanketed the country landscape around central Iowa with inches of snow. When the weather was fit to fly the drone, I went over to the Templeton barn and captured the scene during midday and also during sunset.
The weather was still cold out so I controlled the drone inside my warm truck with the iPad and controller while it buzzed around the barn and corn crib. I shot in manual mode and would first autofocus the drone and then turn it to manual. To get different exposures, I used the auto exposure bracketing settings on the Mavic Pro as well.
I used Lightroom to edit the RAW files of the drone and first started by finding the lens correction for the Mavic Pro. Next adjustments were noise reduction and sharpening. I used a previously created preset of landscape to bring out the sunset which caused a problem in the snow. To create a snow that was brighter and whiter, I increased the whites under the tone channel in Lightroom. Graduated and radial filters with their adjustments of exposure and saturation were used to fine tune the look of the barn and crib. In Photoshop, I cloned out unwanted objects like power lines and cell phone towers to finish off the scene the Mavic Pro captured.
The Mavic Pro had no problem flying in temperatures between 10 and 20 when I took these shots but it requires keeping the batteries warm and also watching the battery life because it drops in cold temperatures just like any other battery.
Included is a 100% crop of an edited file from the Mavic Pro showing that the drone can accomplish some pretty good results but with a limit to depth of field with its fixed aperture.
