Flap in the trees!

Flying my drone in the trees!

On my drive home from work with the car windows cracked open I stopped at a junction a scent drifted though the open window that reminded me of a holiday from the past year. While travelling though Oregon, North California and the Sierra Nevada Mountains (woo Yosemite) I experienced the calming properties of the pine forests, the ground was littered with pine cones and bark chippings roasting and releasing their oils in to the air around me, I thought the closest I could get to this with out a ten hour flight would be to jump in the car and head to my closest pine woodland to my location.

I finally gathered up the bottle and took the drone flying in the forest. Dodging trees and not slamming in to low hanging branches precariously reaching out between the trees. It took a bit of practise but the further I went the better I felt, to which hopefully refined the skills needed to fly in drone hazardous environments for anything to come in the future.

Flying thought the trees:

This video was deep in-between the pine tress in the south of England after a hot summers day, the footage is raw and clunky as you can see by the sharp turns and altitude changes. Pretty nerve racking as I had to turn off the fly to home setting as it would just smash in to the canopy of the forest or the tree trunks.

Flying down the path:

After a successful navigation between the trees, i spotting a path in middle of the video above. I thought it be best that try and capture something a little less taxing on my nerves.
The video below is a slow fly over a path with a quick duck under a low branch.

Flying down the path: This time with sun and lens flare!

The same path as the last video just this time the other way. I knew that the sun would be directly in to the camera but I didn't see it while looking on the screen. The lens flare every now and then interjected by the tree trunks I think adds to the video.

Around the 17 to 22 second mark I just missed the low hanging branch more luck than skill!

Still Photos:

And finally two photos from the canopy of the trees.

I used two different angles and exposures from almost the same position to get drastically varying results.

BONUS BEHIND THE SCENES:

With lots of thanks to my assistant who took these two photos and patently waited while I dodged the trees!

You can just about make out the drone above, look at the low hanging branch centre right of this photo. In one of the videos above I narrowly missed the one dead branch.