Aerial View of Lake Panorama National G.C.

Equipment Used: DJI Mavic Pro, Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop CC

At the beginning of July, I got to capture a new perspective of some of my favorite scenes to photograph after renting a drone for ten days. The DJI Mavic Pro was the drone I choice to rent based off its solid spec’s and packability. It arrived with 2 batteries which allowed me to fly around 40 minutes before I’d have to quit to charge the batteries.

There are a lot of menu’s on the drone and I watched a number of youtube videos to learn how to fly the drone before it arrived. In the menu’s, I changed the return home attitude, responsiveness of the controls and a few other things. In the photo menu, I shot in RAW, 4:3 Ratio and auto exposure. The Mavic Pro has a standard f2 aperture which I wish was adjustable like its bigger brother the Phantom.

I used the way points, tripod and point of interest features in the intelligent flight modes on the drone. The tripod mode is designed to make the unit hover in the air more precisely to allow for better photographs. I used the point of interest and way points to do videos of LPN GC. The way point mode was a constant learning curve and in the end, resulted in the crash of the drone. I learned the hard way when setting way points, before hitting apply after setting your last way point, be sure the drone is at a height that will fly over all obstacles. Once that apply button is hit, the drone flies back to your first way point at the same height as your last way point. If you can’t stop this feature in time, you run into a tree like I did that broke the gimbal bracket for the camera. Grrr

I edited the Mavic Pro’s DNG RAW files in Lightroom and used my custom golf course preset and then further tweaked the saturation and luminance sliders to enhance the colors of the fairways and greens. Lightroom even had a lens correction profile for the drone that I discovered late in the process of editing these images.

In Photoshop, I first cloned out unwanted objects or fixed the look of the fairway using the patch, clone and healing brush tools.  From 50 plus feet up in the air, you capture details that you don’t get on the ground such has the large amount of divots in a fairway. After that step was done, I then used a levels, photo filter and exposure adjustment layers with layer masks to put the finishing touches on the look of drone images.  The last step was to sharpen the images using a high pass filter.

After using the Mavic Pro for seven days, it was very neat to get the aerial perspective of the golf course along with other scenes like my hunting spots or farm fields. I found myself wishing the two batteries was four so I could fly longer between charges! After the use of the drone, I can see myself purchasing a unit in the future and can’t wait to find a unit that fits my requirements. 

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