Look up

I have some rural cousins who have tree stands on the family farm. Apparently Minnesota deer don't have the sense to look up to see a guy with a gun up in the stand. But I proved today that a Montana deer will look up to see what the buzzing sound is over their head. I got my high-speed memory card a few days earlier than expected so unleashed the DJI Mini 4K on a deer I saw sitting under a tree in our yard. Here are two stills, one from the Mini and one from the 6D Mark II with 100-400mm zoom at 400mm. The deer was not bothered at all by the presence of the drone, or of me. The image from the mini was shot with 2x digital zoom, I believe. As I said in my last post, the Mini costs a little bit more than a trailcam, so even though the image quality isn't nearly as good as the Mavic or the DSLR, it is far better than any trailcam.

It was cloudy with a few raindrops today, so I only took a couple videos of the house to make sure the new card was providing the capacity to take videos. It does, but the videos were 1080p, not 4K. It took a few minutes to find the setting to bump up the resolution, but it is still rainy and a bit windy now so I won't be flying again today.

I think the highest and best use of the Mini, at least for now, is to practice using DJI's automated modes, saving wear and tear on the more expensive drone. I tried to have it circle the house starting with the south wall, but it doesn't use the entire house as the center of the circle. The furthest point of the circle was directly over the house, not past the north wall. I need to choose a day to annoy my neighbors and systematically go through the modes on the two drones. That is about 1:30 hours of combined flight time with my current battery capacity.

Drones (plural)

After purchasing a DJI Mavic 3 Pro for shooting real estate, the DJI Mini 4K came up for sale for $240 on Amazon Prime Day, about 1/10th the price of the Mavic. What the heck, I said, that's just a little bit more than I usually spend on a trailcam, and trailcams don't fly. Today I had a chance to make a bit of a comparison, although I wasn't able to test out the Mini's video. The item description online only said that it takes an "SD Card" and didn't specify micro. I was 95% sure it needed a micro card and didn't come with one, but in abundance of caution I did not order one. I ended up cannibalizing a 16Gb card from one of my tablets, which got the Mini going well enough to take a few photos, but it is not nearly fast enough to save 4K video. I have a fast 128Gb card on order.

A constraint for small drones is the 0.55 lb. weight limit for recreational fliers to avoid FAA registration, and the Mini bumps right up against that limit. (But I registered the Mini anyway in case I ever need to use it on a job.) The look and feel of the Mavic at 2.1 lbs. is much more robust. There are many things you get for ten times the price, but I will just mention two: Omnidirectional obstacle avoidance, and three very good cameras. The Mini only has downward obstacle avoidance, and one OK camera.

The Mini takes 12Mp stills (4,000x3,000) and can save either JPG or JPG+RAW. In my opinion, the JPGs lack detail and don't look good, but images processed from RAW (actually DNG) are better. I did a manual adjustment on this first image exposure otherwise it would have been too dark, but the gray sky doesn't look too great. On a non-smoky day, perhaps it would look better. The camera is OK, not great, unlike the Mavic main Hasselblad camera which I would categorize as great.

The Mavic comes with a dedicated controller, while the Mini's controller doesn't have a screen and has to be connected to a phone. I actually don't hate this as much as I thought I would, but it would be best not to get any phone calls while flying. The controls are the same on the two controllers as far as I can tell, so skills learned on one should translate to the other.

One interesting thing I noticed from taking the image of the drones in flight today is they seem to be leaning to the left but the gimbal is holding the camera level. It is really noticeable in the image of the Mavic, but also is there in the image of the Mini. We had about a 10 mph wind today, so they leaned into the wind to maintain position. Although they can fly winds at least twice that speed, they do have to fight against it.

First image from the Mini.

Mini in flight.

Mavic in flight.

Size comparison, with controllers.

Little bluebird

I got a few images from the birdbath today, but perhaps I should switch the motion trigger to the old nest box. The bluebirds hang around the box now that the swallows are gone. I read a few years ago that they might nest a couple times a year, but I haven't seen any evidence that they are carrying nesting material in. I would attempt remote trigger with the 6D on autofocus if I had time, but for the next few weeks I probably will not. This image is, I presume, one of their fledglings from this spring. Canon 5D Mark III #8 with 70-200mm lens, and to change it up I moved the camera closer and shot at 70mm.

And later in the evening the flicker came to call.

Followup

Hoping to get some little bluebirds and even little robins as a followup to what I got on the trailcam, I put out the Canon 5D Mark III #8 with 70-200mm lens at 200mm on motion trigger this afternoon. I got some good shots of the adults, but that's all. I seem to have settled on the 5D as my motion trigger camera. It is set on low-speed burst and usually fires off four images at a time, today taking a little more than 300 images in 6+ hours. About 200 of those images had a subject that was in focus (prefocused), which is a pretty good percentage. The 5D has better resolution than the 1D, and lets me save wear-and-tear on the 6D. I will keep trying because that is what I do, but I would like to figure out a different prop. The little birdbath has gotten a lot of publicity, but I don't know what else will attract the birds to a particular spot.

My setting for the 5D today was f/10 at 1/800, ISO automatic. I think the haze in the air from distant forest fires reduced the light just a little bit. The sunlit shots came in at ISO 500-1000, and the last shot of the flicker was ISO 5000. I used Photoshop DeNoise to smooth that out a bit.

Robin

Shake it off

Bluebird

Flicker flicks water in the air

Colorful wings, ISO 5000

Bluebird fledglings

With the holiday followed by a three-day trip, the Gardepro has been quietly gathering images for the past 11 days without my intervention. Which is what a trail camera is for. I have the 5D/70-200/motion trigger deployed this afternoon to get some better images, but the trail camera showed me what was happening while I was busy elsewhere. The bluebird fledglings are now out of the nest (wherever it is) and are showing up in my yard to use the small birdbath.

Also, an image of the flicker pair together has been captured, but it seems only one of them hops up on the birdbath at a time. In the fourth image below, the female is waiting for the male to finish. No comment. After that, a light-brown bird with which I am unfamiliar showed up in recent images. It is about the same size and has similar features as a robin, but my bird book doesn't show this as a color variation for a robin. Cornell's Lab of Ornithology is probably the pre-eminent source for bird information, and they have an Artificial Intelligence app that will identify birds from a photo. Everyone is worried about AI taking over the world, but Cornell's AI Merlin Photo ID app doesn't know what this is. Maybe some human at Cornell will take a look at it and send me an email.

The image below that most definitely is a robin, a fledgling. And below, another actual robin, hogging the whole bowl of the birdbath.

Finally, another birdbath hog, one of the two crows that monopolizes the bath for 30 minutes at a time. I think I finally figured out what they are doing. They drop the sunflower seeds into the water, then fish them out a while later. Maybe it softens them up. I'm going to stop stocking the nearby platform feeder for a while to give the bluebirds, flickers and robins a chance to enjoy the water. Those three species all eat insects and do not go after the seeds.

Bluebird family: female, fledgling, male.

Bluebird male and fledgling.

Bluebird male.

Male flicker getting a drink and female watching at left.

Unidentified.

Robin fledgling.

Robin birdbath hog.

Crow birdbath hog.

Drone

I have resisted getting a drone because I'm not sure what I would do with it. I fancy myself as a wildlife photographer, and I don't think it is ethical to chase down critters with a drone. But it will be used primarily for photographing real estate. I tested it out today and have the basics covered. I can get it up in the air and take a pictue.

Practicing some more, a couple days later. JPG not processed at all, but the camera can take RAW images for processing in Photoshop.

Video, camera resolution is 4K but this has been downsized to 1080p, and Blogger adds A LOT of compression. The original and the 1080p look a lot better than this. This clip is actually running backward:

ISO Again

We went to XTreme Bulls last night in rainy, overcast Red Lodge, Montana. With the weather, the light, and our seats high up in the grandstand, I decided not to take a DSLR and big lens. I settled for the Canon M100 mirrorless #10 with the 70-200mm lens, hoping to get one or two snapshots. I set the ISO on 1600 and didn't expect much.

Of course, I ended up taking nearly 400 snapshots, and even found the "burst mode". The specs say the M100 can fire four shots per second using Servo Autofocus. I have never really used this feature in the seven years I have had the camera since it has no viewfinder and usually it is difficult to follow action with the view screen. But bulls stay in a fairly small circle and I found it possible to keep it centered. The longest burst I took was 18 images, at which point the camera's buffer became full and I had to wait. That's only 4.5 seconds, which isn't quite long enough to get the full eight seconds of a successful ride, so I had to be somewhat judicious when holding down the button. I also hadn't cleaned off my memory card recently, so ended the night with the 32Gb card almost full.

With the 1600 ISO, I ran the images through Photoshop AI DeNoise but at only 10%, a much lower level than I used on the 20000 ISO female flicker a couple days ago. The images aren't winning any prizes, but I consider them usable. As I become more used to Photoshop and Lightroom, I find myself becoming more dependent on their features and probably would find it hard to go back to Photoshop Elements. Which is what Adobe wants since Photoshop/Lightroom is ongoing subscription revenue whereas Elements is a one-time purchase.

The Canon M series mirrorless, introduced 2012, is not to be confused with the Canon R series mirrorless, introduced in 2018 and now the company's flagship line. They use different mounts, and Canon has abandoned the M line. In retrospect it was a mistake to buy the M100 back in 2017, but I still use the camera often enough to justify not putting it up on eBay. It has a 24Mp sensor so in terms of number of pixels it is right up there with my two newer DSLRs, and with an adapter it can use any of my EOS lenses. But if I had to start completely over, I would get two Canon R cameras, the R6 Mark II and the 45Mp R5. I have the adapter to use traditional EOS lenses, but of course if you are starting completely over you want R-mount lenses. I feel how Canon owners must have felt back in 1987 when the EOS system was introduced and the FD manual focus cameras and lenses passed into obsolescence.

Anyway, here is one of the better images I got at ISO 1600. The shutter speed is only 1/250th and the aperture was wide open at f/4. If you look closely at the dark bull, you can see it is raining. It's amazing I got anything at all.

Today there was yet another high ISO experience. This deer stuck her nose into the little birdbath a few minutes before 9 pm. ISO was 12800 and I applied my now-customary 10% Photoshop AI DeNoise. Below that is the same scene from the perspective of the Reconyx that has been at home for the past week. Keeping with my recent theme here, the Reconyx reports ISO 200 and exposure time of 1/160th, no f/stop. The device on the tripod is the motion trigger, which wirelessly communicates with the DSLR several yards away to the right. It is a good thing I didn't get the Reconyx back out in the woods Monday because several of the batteries that I thought would be OK totally died in just a few days. Now I've got fresh ones in there and it is probably going out Friday, and I can get a first look at the videos from the new Browning #15.

I'm also including here a shot from the big birdbath of a goldfinch sharing with a couple of sparrows. I haven't seen the goldfinches for a few weeks but they came by today.

Canon 5D Mark III #8

Reconyx #2

Gardepro T5CF #14