Mavic Pro - Lake Panorama National GC Early Spring
Equipment Used: DJI Mavic Pro, Apple iPad, Lightroom & Photoshop CC
Spring has arrived and so has the beauty and lush green grass of Lake Panorama National Golf Course and the Mavic Pro has been flying around at sunrise and sunset to capture the scene when wind conditions have been low.
I used DJI’s Go4 app on the iPad to control the drone while flying with heights from 70 to 390 ft depending on the angle and image I wanted to capture. I used AEB feature on the app to record bracketed exposures to help capture the sky and also the ground. To create the panoramic shots, I switched the drone to tripod mode and then rotated the drone to get the whole scene captured. I also used the panoramic mode on the drone that captures and rotates the drone automatically which I’ll need to learn more on to start the drone at the right spot to capture what I want too.
Once in Lightroom, I first stated with presets of golf course and autumn color boost hdr that I’ve created or got from the web. The leaves on the trees were just starting to bud out so these presets helped improve the look of the trees. The graduated and radial filters were used to fine tune the exposure of the images I selected to use for the sky and the ground. The panoramic were made in LR using its panoramic mode and I selected multiple images to merge into one.
I merged the sky and a ground image into one image in Photoshop by opening them has layers directly from LR. The gradient tool was used over the layer masks of the two images to blend the sky and ground together. The healing, clone and patch tool were used to get rid of unwanted objects in the images. Just to the left of the driving range, a tennis court was removed when I took this series of images so it was just dirt but the above tools did a good job of creating grass in that area.
After getting these images completed and the results of them, I’m really looking forward to getting more throughout the golf season of LPN with different skies and conditions.
