As those who have been following our journey will know I have been using a DJI Phanton 2 Vision Quadcopter for photography.
The Phantom vision camera can take both HD video and still images (14 mega pixel) with a 120/110/85 deg. field of view.
The stills camera can shoot both raw and jpg format. The Adobe photoshop raw editor has support for the phantom raw format (DNG) including lens profile correction so you have everything required to create panos.
Taking the shots with the quad is quite easy, simply elevate the craft to the height and location and take a series if still shots rotating the craft each time. I tend to take anywhere between 5-6 shots 20 deg either side of direction the quad is pointing. You can use the video down link to setup the first shot and then rotate from there. The in built radar showing the direction of the quad is useful to see where the craft is pointing if it's hard to see. The lens is quite wide angle so you don't need to take a large number of shots. I have experimented with 180 deg panos but they tend come out looking a tad weird.
Once you have the images off the camera you need to open them all simultaneously using the Adobe raw editor. This is a good point at which to apply a lens correction to remove the wide angle distortion. I use lightroom so this is simply means adjusting one picture and copying the settings across to all the images. This ensures that corrections made occur uniformly across all images.
Within Lightroom all the images can be selected and then sent to the Photoshop pano tool which will stitch all the images together. Once the pano is created typically it needs to be cropped and exported to jpg format for use online.
I did have a few issues prior to purchasing the Rotorpixel gimbal where the quad was sometimes being buffeted by wind and the horizon was not level in each picture resulting in issues matching the images. However one I fitted the Rotorpixel gimbal the horizon remains dead flat no matter how the craft moves around during a rotation, the difference was astounding really.
The results have been outstanding, DJI often refer to the Phantom as a "70 tripod", and it's a very apt description. You can place the quad in positions one could never hope to with a camera and tripod resulting in some very unique shots.
While drones take great pictures they can be potentially very annoying to other photographers or those wanting to just enjoy the great view. Be considerate and don't fly when others are around and certainly not above them or in their field of view. Irresponsible use will lead to them being banned in national parks and around landmarks.
That said, drones are a fantastic tool for photography and provide new and exciting photographic opportunities.