RogerBW's Blog

Drone on the playing fields 02 October 2014

I took the drone out to the local playing fields to try for some longer-range shots. This turned out to be much more challenging than the close-up stuff. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

As usual, the camera fires more often than it's told to. But it's worth noting that it was pointing straight forwards in its mount for all these pictures, which shows just how unstable a platform the thing can be.

Looking westwards up the valley (sun just to the left behind a cloud). The minimum height for rugby goal posts is 3.4m, but the crossbar is canonically 3m above the ground, so I'm guessing these are more like 9m tall.

The blurring (from vibration from the rotors?) starts, and some blooming round the edge that I think is backscatter from the lens surround.

Swinging round to the north.

Car park, to the south. Lots of blurring here, alas.

Eastwards, climbing to see over the trees.

Not much to see there; the trading estate isn't horribly tall.

North of east, houses across London Road.

A better exposure of the field itself; based on the goalpoats I'm guessing the camera is around 30-40m above ground level.

Obviously this isn't anything like commercial grade imagery. But this is taken with a basic near-toy system and a tiny camera, with no stabilisation or anti-vibration mount. I am severely impressed.


  1. Posted by Michael Cule at 10:28am on 02 October 2014

    I can see tech like this making a difference to investigative journalism and the coverage of things like riots and demonstrations.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 11:00am on 02 October 2014

    Especially if you can program it to fly home when the police take the controller away from you.

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