Droning on ...

I have two bits of bad news for those of you thinking that one of these new drone helicopters would be a great way to spy on the neighbour who likes to sunbathe topless.

• Drones make a racket like a swarm of bees so she's going to guess these's something going on long before you get in range and 
• The built-in camera has such a wide angle that you'd have to get with axe range before you'd see anything and all you'd see at that point would be a brief glimpse of an axe descending before the video feed cut out.

So for those of you who'd like to use a drone for honest, above-the-board fun, here's a review of the new DJI Phantom 3 Professional.  

In the box

What's in the box is exactly what DJI says so I won't repeat it here.  

What's missing?  

To my astonishment, DJI do not ship propellor guards as standard with the Phantom 3.  This is crazy.  For many people, the DJI Phantom will be their first drone and being excited they will skip through the manual to the bit that tells you how to take off and they will get it to take off.  The next thing they will do is fly it into a tree.  Or a person.  Neither of these is good and yet those cheap and cheerful prop guards have an excellent chance of saving the Phantom when it encounters a tree (as I know from experience) and an even better chance of saving the person from having their face shredded.

Manuals are a RRPITA to read, right?  Don't care.  Read them.  They're not that long, especially if you can read without moving your lips (and if you can't you shouldn't be let loose with a drone anyway).  There's an especially useful bit about pre-takeoff checks and the order in which to do things.

Now while unpacking the Phantom 3 you will run into one of the big issues that plagues much new technology today: someone who presumably owns a shrink-wrap plastic factory has persuaded DJI that much of the Phantom, the controller and the propellors must be encased in plastic.  So instead of having fun with your new toy you ... are ... wrestling ... with ... this ... blasted ... shrink-wrap.  Why, for heaven's sake, why?  It took me somewhere between five and ten agonising minutes to get the shrink-wrap off just four propellors.  Now I need finger transplants.

So, let's assume you've upgraded the microcode, RTFMed, charged all the batteries, downloaded the pilot app to your tablet or phone and you're now ready to go.

How does it fly?

Brilliantly.  

I am sorry to follow the previous grumbles with a great gush of enthusiasm, but the Reviewers' Code of Ethics compels me to say it is a joy to fly.  I hadn't flown a drone for five months when I took the Phantom aloft and it was delightful.  It seemed a lot more stable than the Phantom 2; is this a better GPS system or was I lucky?  The first time I flew a Phantom 2 in my back garden it headed straight into a tree (and was only saved by prop-guards); the Phantom 3 took off gently and just hung there moving an inch or two in the breeze but essentially beautifully stable, almost as if tethered by an anchor.

The controls seemed a little less sensitive, too.  I could nudge the Phantom 3 this way or that to get precise positioning.  I can land it to within a couple of inches of the spot I want, which is excellent.  I've flown it up to 100 metres (330 ft) height and 500 metres away, at which stage it is a tiny but still visible spec and it flew as controlled.

The camera and gimbal

I have the Pro version of the camera: basically a 12 megapixel camera and 4k video camera.  Really, 12 mp is ample and 4k is more than that.  But what's the quality like?  I'll post a video once I've got round to editing it, but in short the quality of the video is outstanding: good colours, great resolution. You feel like you're in an IMAX theatre looking at the output.  Especially if you're viewing it on an Apple iMac, or what I call "a proper computer".

But ...

But. But. But.

I haven't yet managed to get the gimbal level.  So I end up with pictures and video where the horizon is not level (in the screen grab from video above I manually straightened it).  I have run the IMU calibration - in the annoyingly undocumented DJI pilot app - which should have fixed the problem but there's still a lean of about 2 degrees - enough to be truly irritating. If this is supposed to be the Professional version of the P3, then a level camera is a prereq.  Here's a cropped shot: I did a 360º turn and the right horizon was consistently higher than the left.

Summary

I'm going to give the DJI Phantom 3 Professional 3 stars out of five.  That may seem a bit harsh but while it has these great pros:

• excellent control
• great value for money
• outstanding camera

it still has these things that need fixing:

• gimbal calibration
• packaging
• lack of prop guards - really these should be standard
• no documentation for the DJI pilot App - this is truly bizarre

And the good news is that all these things are fixable.  They can even be fixed in retrospect. 

Get to it, DJI!

La Cage Aux Folles

No, you're wrong.

This is not about politics.

I had the pleasure on Saturday evening of going to an intimate theatre in the south of Hampshire and watching perhaps the best amateur production I have ever seen. Actually, there is no "perhaps" about it. It was delightful.

The theatre is a converted small barn on the edge of Fareham: it holds just 80 people. It may astonish you to hear that they don't have a revolving stage, or room for acrobats or tigers. They have to rely on pure talent, and they have it by the bucketload. Their production of "La Cage Aux Folles" was spectacular, despite a host of challenges, which started with having to translate it from the French.

There was one problem: the audience was laughing so much in the second act it was often difficult to hear the words. No matter: the acting was all that mattered.

The play was put on by The Titchfield Festival Theatre and, although its run has ended, they have a full programme of forthcoming events, which I thoroughly recommend.

They even let you take photographs (no flash). Take that, West End.

Can Spring be Far Behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" The answer this year seems to be "Yes!" Yesterday it was -5ºC when I left home and it's not a lot warmer now. So it's with longing that I look back to last spring, when Colleen and I went for a walk from Hook to West Green House in Mattingley. It's about four miles through pleasant fields when suddenly, near our destination, we came across this idyllic country scene. Click here for a larger picture.

Those cows are actually quite large and we made a point of giving them, and especially their calves (out of picture) a wide berth.

Roll on the warmer days of spring!

Photography

It's a while since I posted some photographs and looking through my collection it seemed to me that there are some that by good fortune came out quite well.

The photo above is an example. It was taken at my friend Russ's 60th birthday party. He's a neurologist by profession but has a band as well and they played some marvellous music. I'd been taking photos with my flash all evening and these pics were OK, but the flash failed on this picture and the lights of the stage came out in gorgeous colour.

So this photo was a mistake, but one I'm glad I made.

Footnote: Having blogged this, I see blogger has cut off the right 1/4 of the picture. If you click on the photo you'll see the whole picture and consequently the full range of colours.

Sunday Photo of the Week

Yes, I know it's Tuesday. I spent Sunday making cookies.

Anyway, back to the photo. About 30 minutes south of Cape Town is the town of Fish Hoek. It has a gorgeous sandy beach which is extremely safe for swimming. The water in the bay is shallow and only gradually gets deeper, with gentle tides so it's a favourite with families.

There are also some fishermen who scrape a living by pulling their boats out into False Bay. In the olden days, fishing here was pretty much a hit-or-miss affair but since the coming of cheap mobile phones things have changed. They have a "spotter" who sits with binoculars on the rocky hill overlooking the bay. As soon as he spots a shoal of fish he phones the fishermen who are resting in the dunes and within a couple of minutes with a flurry of activity they have launched their rowing boat, just as they are doing in this photo.

Later in the day, you can eat their catch at the pleasant Beachcomber or Gallery restaurants a few hundred yards down the beach.

Sunday Photo Of the Week (SPOW)

I visited Las Vegas last year and, having flown in from London, was pretty jet-lagged. So on the first morning I woke very early. As I walked out of my hotel, I saw this view of New York.

The pre-dawn sky was exactly this gorgeous shade of deep blue and it looked as though the hotel had been built to look its best when viewed from an inconspicuous entry to the MGM Grand.

This being Vegas, there were still plenty of people around at 5am although to be fair a good number of them were joggers. It made me decide to take up early-morning jogging and I only gave up on this resolution once I'd actually tried it.

Sunday Photo Of the Week (SPOW)

Old Potbridge Road lies between Hook and Hartley Wintney in North East Hampshire. It's a very quiet country road, with just four or five homes built along it and it comes to a dead end in real life long before the map shows this.

However, it's a high point relative to the land to the west and so when we had a lovely sunset in the spring, I set off for the Old Potbridge Road to take some photos. I took several dozen, but most weren't keepers. One of the survivors is shown above; the remaining half dozen are in my online album.

Sunday Photo Of the Week (SPOW)

When I turned 50, I had planned to play a couple of songs on the guitar at my party. However, I found it was just too difficult to rescue the skills I'd had 30 years earlier, even with the help of a good guitar instructor.

Russ Lane is a good friend who recently had a Significant Birthday. To my chagrin and envy, he achieved what I had failed to do, and played and sang half a dozen great rock 'n' roll numbers from his youth. Here he is, at the microphone, giving a short talk at the end to the assembled partygoers. My word, did he play well. It made me relieved, in retrospect, that I hadn't succeeded - my efforts would have paled in comparison.

I shot quite a few photos at his party. This one was one of the better ones, ironically taken when my flash failed and so it retained the great colours of the nightclub. 75mm, f1.6, 1/60, ISO 200. The original is here.