Bam!

I feel like it’s starting to come together a bit better. I’m very happy with the way this video turned out.

Although, there were two near-crashes that got my heart pounding…

During the opening shot I lost eye contact with the Phantom once it got up near the top of the falls. I’ve got the contrast, brightness, and saturation on the camera turned down a few notches while filming so I can adjust all of that in post. However, this causes very low contrast on the phone screen while flying so smaller obstacles can easily blend in with the background. Once I reached the top of the falls I met just such a branch. I didn’t see it until the obstacle sensors went off but at that point, it was too late. I saw the branch hit the camera and the altitude begin to drop. In the time it took my heart rate to jump to 9000 the Phantom recovered and maintained altitude. After this little accident I turned around and flew back to the bridge where we were standing. It is because of this small branch that I didn’t get the single shot all the way from the base of the falls to the top of the falls. Even though my pulse rate had recovered my hands weren’t exactly steady at this point.

The second near miss came towards the end of the day. The shot is the fast and low approach to the falls that you see just before the cliff jumper. I had a small audience standing with me on the bridge and I suppose I was trying to show off. I sped into the gorge and up the waterfall as you see in the video, then I flew backwards towards the bridge at full speed. I thought I’d timed it right to stop before hitting the small trees on the side of the main pool but I did not. The Phantom clipped a few branches and shredded a few leaves. Luckily I recovered quickly and got it out of trouble but not before the shredded leaves painted the Phantom a nice hue of green.

Aside from these two mishaps it was a great day all the way around. When I was a boy my father took us all to Smalls Falls every summer, and now that I’ve got a family of my own, I’m doing the same. We lucked out to get such a sunny day – the water at Smalls Falls is 2 degrees from being ice. It’s so cold that it takes the breath out of you the first time you jump in. Regardless, spending a hot summer day cliff jumping and swimming among waterfalls is hard to beat.

Happy trails,
FatherGoat

The post MEFALLS #3 | Smalls Falls | Phantom 4 appeared first on FatherGoat.

We’re still in a bit of a drought here in Maine so the volume of water coming over the falls is much less than we’d see in a normal year. The same is true of Houston Brook Falls I posted last week. I’ll take this as an opportunity though – I’ll return to all these falls when water levels return and we’ll have an interesting comparison to make.

I didn’t like some of the flickering in the HBF video so I switched the camera on the Phantom over to manual and messed with the settings myself. I’m mostly pleased with the way things came out.

I filmed in D-Log color with an ISO of 400 and a shutter speed of 60. There wasn’t a lot of color information to begin with as there was little sunlight and we were in a narrow gorge (not the most colorful place around).

I turned the shutter speed down as I’d seen some videos where people claim that it gives a more cinematic look and I wanted to give it a whirl. Well, I’m not pleased. Turning the shutter speed down introduces natural motion blur as the shutter is open for longer periods of time. You also lose some detail in the image if there is any movement while the shutter is open. I prefer a much sharper image than what we got in this video. I would really like a hyper-real image when shooting the falls.

It’s all a matter of preference and this is mine. We’re headed out again on Labor Day to another large set of falls to capture some more footage. I’ll crank that shutter speed back up and see if I can’t get a better detailed image this time ’round. Also, the ND filters for the Phantom came in which gives me one more variable with which to work.

Happy Trails,
FatherGoat

The post MEFALLS #2 | Mosher Hill Falls | Phantom 4 appeared first on FatherGoat.

The lovely MotherGoat gave me an early Christmas gift and I took it out flying to make this video. I’m not quite sure what to say about the Phantom 4 other than it’s fricken amazing and a metric shit-ton of fun!

This was my first real attempt at flying while trying to capture video of something. There were some very strong wind gusts, trees, and of course, plenty of water to make flying tricky and nerve racking. Overall I think it went well for a first filming-flight. I’ve got a lot to learn about piloting the Phantom and capturing proper video but I’ll keep at it.

I’m going to start a new series called “MEFALLS” (MainE WaterFALLS). Maine is full of great waterfalls begging to visited and filmed. I don’t have a schedule put together yet on when I plan to put out MEFALLS videos. I had planned on getting a video out at least once per month but I failed this last month. Thankfully, day-trip MEFALLS videos go through the editing process fairly quickly. I’m going to try to keep the time between filming and editing to a minimum.

I plan on taking this out on some hikes later this fall to see what I can capture. I know I’m a bit behind at the moment with getting videos out – I apologize to those of you waiting on new content. Life, as it has a habit of doing, got in the way of editing. However, I should be good to go to get new content posted in the coming weeks. I still have a number of trips from last year that I haven’t edited, as well as a few from this spring.

Happy trails,
FatherGoat

The post MEFALLS #1 | Houston Brook Falls | Phantom 4 appeared first on FatherGoat.