Waddell Beach by Drone

I’m not sure if anyone is really paying attention but I thought I should address why my new drone photos are taken with my old Phantom 3 instead of the Mavic Pro I was using earlier this year. It’s a bit emberrasing but I suffered a GPS failure on my Mavic while taking photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, I had no clue the GPS had failed so I was still trying to rely on it to fly. The drone of course was not responding to directional commands and would only go up and down, and since I was flying over the bay at the time landing was not an option. I kept trying to tell it to return home to no avail and was restarting my controller etc in a bit of a panic. The wind was taking it further and further into the bay and before I knew it I lost my signal and I never saw the drone again. It most likely ran out of juice and fell into the bay. I was hesitant to talk about this because in hindsight I realized it was a GPS failure and I could have manually used ATTI mode to fly it home. I really should have known to do that, which is why this story is a bit embarrassing for me to tell. I had recently got the drone and was only able to use it for 1-2 months prior to this.

This incident bummed me out quite a bit and it played a role in why my posts on here slowed down to a crawl. Prior to getting the Mavic I had crashed my phantom 3 and messed up the camera gimbal. I was without a working drone for a while but I eventually ordered new parts for my phantoms broken gimbal along with a new range extender kit and fixed up the phantom to be better then new. With the range extender kit I am getting 3x more range out of this thing and I am finally over losing the Mavic Pro. The portability of the Mavic was amazing but it was the long range that really made it for me.

So back to my arial photography assault on the California coastline. I took this shot yesterday while flying the drone at Waddell Beach. I love the steep cliffs on this stretch of coastline, from the sky it provides a really cool contrast from green forest sitting on top. This is also the ending point to the skyline to sea trail as it follows Waddell Creek down to the sea from Big Basin State Park.