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.