Drones are cool. But I never figured out how they fit into my style of shooting. After messing around with two recent acquisitions I'm still not sure.

The tipping point for finally taking the plunge was my brother giving me some business doing real estate images. I took the FAA Part 107 test and am now a licensed commercial drone pilot. For equipment, I decided on a DJI Mavic 3 Pro, a nice drone with three cameras. The primary camera is my first Hasselblad, 20Mp sensor, 28mm (equivalent) wide angle lens. Camera #2 has a 48Mp sensor (by far my largest ever) and 70mm lens. The third camera has a 166mm lens. I'm not a believer in digital zoom, but the manual claims it can zoom in another 4x, which would put it at 664mm. I'm not naive enough to believe the image quality will compare with my huge Canon 500mm lens, but I haven't tried it yet. This long lens might allow me to get some wildlife images without causing a ruckus, but the sensor is only 12Mp. All of the cameras are 4:3 but I usually crop to 3:2, which means I lose at least 11% to cropping on every image.

A few weeks after getting the Mavic, the DJI Mini 4K came on sale during Amazon Prime Day. For $240, it was an impulse purchase. It didn't come with a memory card, so with that and the carrying case the final cost was about $300. But still much, much cheaper than the Mavic. One way I rationalized the purchase was it is just a bit more expensive than a trail camera, but it flies through the air and the image quality is better. It has one camera, 12Mp with a 24mm (equivalent) lens. Compared to the Hasselblad on the Mavic, it's quite mediocre, but it is passable. The bottom line is I will be much less upset if I fly the Mini into the ground instead of the Mavic. The flight modes are extremely similar, so I've been practicing a lot with the Mini. And I happened to be using the Mini when I got the below image of a deer in my yard. The deer seemed more curious than bothered by the buzzing sound over its head, and sat still long enough for me to get my DSLR and take a terrestrial shot also. Both the Mavic and Mini shoot stills in RAW mode with a DNG extension, which is a huge selling point for me since I have been shooting RAW since 2002.

I killed off my main blog at Blogspot and am doing it here instead, but I still have Tom's Trailcam Central on Blogspot. There I post diatribes about my experiments with trail cameras, remote triggers, camera trap motion triggers, and now drones. In other words, everything except hand-operated cameras. Recent posts have a couple different types of panorama images taken with the drones.

BTW, I tend to quote camera specs in terms of still images, not video, because I've shot 100,000+ still images in the past 20 years and just a few videos. (That's doesn't include trailcam false triggers. Then the number would exceed 250,000.) As far as I know, the Mavic's video specs are impressive, and the Mini's 4K specs are a first for that price point. I have messed around assembling some video clips in Adobe Premiere Elements, and at this point that's about all I know about video.

Deer looking up at drone.

Terrestrial deer

DJI Mavic 3 Pro

DJI Mini 4K