Walkabout Roads (3 images)
Opposites Attract
The Rouses Point Bridge, also known as the Korean War Veterans Memorial Bridge, connecting Rouses Point, NY and Alburg, VT, has always fascinated me. Often traveling East to West at the end of a long day experiencing points of interest in Vermont, I find myself in the small parking area attached to the bridge around sunset. For more than a decade, that spot has been the source of all my previously posted images of this unique bridge as it offers great views of the bridge-sunset combination, as well as the bridge’s curved construction. Links to these images appear below.
Finding other interesting spots where the bridge can be photographed is complicated. There aren’t many good vantage points unless a boat is involved.
Enter the drone.
A small road on the New York State side of the bridge leading to the edge of the water is the location of the original bridge. It made an excellent launching spot for the drone. From this location, at 258.6 feet of altitude, I was able to capture this image (and many others), with a brand new perspective.
You can read more about this interesting bridge on Wikipedia.
Other images of this bridge:
Launch site of the drone is here:
https://w3w.co/drastically.activism.requested
///drastically.activism.requested
44.999636, -73.3539
North Country Attractions (8 images)
There is just something quite wonderful about Upstate New York. And this is definitively not the region just north of NYC that is referenced as “Upstate” by countless geographically-challenged city dwellers. This is the Upstate that is actually Upstate; North of the NYS Thruway, filled with farms, fields, open sky, trees, streams and rivers, countless country roads, and dotted with small towns.
The Fork In The Road
Extreme Stop & Go (2 images)
Moose Sightings (10 images • 1 video)
The Kingdom Of Salmonidae (3 images)
Click images for full panorama display…
Life Passages (3 images, video)
The learning-curve for creating drone videos is much bigger than I thought it would be! And learning to fly while capturing photos and videos has plenty of challenges!
The best news is that advancements in drone technology have helped that process profoundly as compared to my early attempts made many years ago. Preset flight routes and maneuvers are now executed with a few taps on the controller - although that doesn’t always guarantee you won’t fly into a tree or some other obstacle. But presets aren’t the full story as it is still necessary to know how to control the device and do that with a level of smoothness. You can see my failings in that regard in the video above! Practice, practice, and more practice will be the only cure to those issues.
Capturing photographs hasn’t been too difficult. I know my way around using all of the manual settings on my cameras, so doing the same work via a remote controller while your camera hovers hundreds of feet in the air hasn’t been much of an issue. And allowing the drone to coordinate the recording of multiple shots that subsequently blend into an assortment of panoramic outcomes has been exceptional.
But applying photography knowledge to video recording and production is only a small portion of the full process. The fundamental principles of photography are certainly the same, but instead of getting everything set for a single shot, now you have to accommodate for thousands of shots per minute! As you can see in my video, with the camera constantly in motion, so too are the while balance, exposure, and focus! And when the drone finally returns to its home location and the captured content makes it to the computer, adjusting all those variables presents a completely new learning curve. This video was somewhat saved by a LUT, but the video is a very long way away from what I would hope it to be.
Again, practice, practice, and even more practice tossed together with help from the Internet (mostly via instructional videos from other creators) will continue to be the best way forward.
So, take it for what it is: Just a whole bunch of experiments tossed together while learning, with no intention of the outcome being anything more than a little bit interesting!
Onward and upward!
