Tag Archives: drones

Drone view of corn harvest

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My buddy George has been flying drones —and using them to record video— pretty much since drones have been available for the consumer market. He has become quite proficient.

The video below –the work of Jack Dodson, a friend and client– is a fascinating look at the corn harvest (from combine to truck) on the Steck farm in the Missouri River Bottom near Jefferson City. The video was captured with the DJI Mavic 3 Pro Cine.

DJI Avata

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The virtual reality thing (as I understand it) hold no appeal for me. But I would be willing to strap on some goggles for a drones-eye-view of some interesting place. This is already a thing, yes?

My friend George recently got his hands on the DJI Avata, a pricey ($1388) little drone you fly with goggles and a joystick.

Reminiscent of William Gibson’s simstim. “…recorded sensoriums, like racing a black Fokker ground-effect plane across the Arizona mesa tops; diving the Truk Island preserves.”

William Gibson’s drones

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Yesterday’s drone flight has me in a drone state of mind. My first (of 25) blog post mentioning drones was in 2005, but some of those are references to military drones so not sure when I became aware of consumer drones. Last night I started reading (for the 10th time?) William Gibson’s 1988 novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive and found this passage:

“She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop nest when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about The way it followed her, as though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.”

The man has been incorporating drones into his stories for 30+ years. And this might not be the first instance.

What the birds see

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My buddy George has been playing with drones for about eight years. (You can see some of his amazing video here, here and here.) In 2015 he got his drone snagged in a very tall tree while shooting some video of our place. So I was a little surprised when he agreed to come back and shoot some video of our recently expanded homestead.

As you might imagine, the technology has gotten a lot better in the last half dozen years and George has gotten even better at flying the things. The video below runs right at 2:30.

This was shot from an altitude of about 400 feet so the drone was just a black dot but the quality of the video was even better than what I’m streaming here.

I love trees. I love being surrounded by them. And I’ve tromped around our acreage over the years so I know there’s a bunch of them. But it took this birds eye view to give me a real sense of just how many trees surround us.

Drone Romance

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“Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in relation to their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. In this near future city drones form both agents of state surveillance but also become co-opted as the aerial vehicles through which two teens fall in love.”