Now that I’m retired, I’ve been looking for something to keep me occupied. When Remnar was out a few summers ago, he brought along a drone and shot some really nice video of the farm. That idea stuck with me, so when I was asked what I wanted for my birthday, I told the family I wanted a drone.

I’ve been looking at these things for a while and the DJI units always seem to get good reviews. I ended up getting a DJI Mini 3 Pro from Amazon.

I got the battery all charged up and headed to the farm. Over the next 3 days, I managed to get off about a dozen flights. This is no toy. It is intelligent enough to take off by itself, and if you take your hands off the controls it hovers where it is. It also uses GPS to know where home is. One button brings it back. It will return home automatically when the battery gets low.

Beyond that, there are a bunch of intelligent functions so that you can tell the drone what the focus of the shot is, and it will do all sorts of extravagant 3D effects. For the most part, I wanted to keep things easy and just keep from flying into trees. However, pretty soon, I was beyond that and skimming the tops of the wildflowers.

All told, I gathered 40+ GB in 12 trips aloft. The drone limits me to 5:32 videos, but it just starts up a new one. I have been home since Monday figuring out a way to get the files transferred and edited. I finally settle on KdenLive editing software. I haven’t edited video since my days in Broadcasting School back in the Seventies, but things have gotten a lot easier in the meanwhile. I put together a 10-minute video that takes you on a tour of the farm.

It took all weekend to shoot and took about 6 hours to edit it down and post it.

Enjoy.

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Thanks to KYHillCHick, Angus, Moose, Mooselette, and Junior for making this happen. I’m so happy, I’m leaving puddles.

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