Eight drone shooting tips and technics for beginners

Sports camera brand GoPro launched its first unmanned drone Karma at the end of 2016. The release of Karma, not only allowed GoPro to realize the full range of sea, air, and land, but also added a great new option for drone enthusiasts. Undoubtedly, UAV is now the new darling of the photography industry, if you are also a shutterbug, are you planning to purchase a drone? Compared with the average camera, UAV is much more expensive, if you can not make the best of your drone and its mini camera, you are wasting your money. The following tips and technics are provided by experienced drone photographers, hoping to help you get started.

1. Find a suitable space

If you are a beginner, remember to avoid water or dense vegetation. Because you may not have the skill to fly before you start practicing, you should try to fly in an open area to prevent falling and shading.

2. Find the right light

Light for the drone's shooting is very much affected, so when shooting in the air, we must pay attention to light problems. Once the light is low, the shots will be relatively dark and less clear.

3. Plan ahead, save the battery

Most drone flight time on the market is 20-30 minutes, such as GoPro's Karma in full power supporting 20-minute aerial photography, and DJI Phantom 4 in full power supports 28 minutes flight time. Therefore, be sure to make a good shooting plan in advance to save the battery, and enough battery to return.

4. Comply with the rules

UAV flight area, aerial height limit, and UAV flight control personnel qualification, etc., need to be determined in advance. Otherwise, it is very dangerous to violate relevant laws and regulations on the way of filming or to fly within an unlawful scope.

5. Choose the right lens

There are many different lenses on the market to choose from, it is recommended to choose a lightweight micro camera so your drone has less load.

6. Set recording parameters

Before the flight, you need to preset the parameters of recording according to your project or work needs. Otherwise, it's hard to change the parameters once you take off.

7. Good at using tools

There are a lot of UAV accessories which are very convenient to use, such as the handheld gimbal.  It is a waste to only use powerful DJI Phantom 3 for aerial photography, this conversion kit allows Phantom 3 to be handheld-able, so you can shoot stable videos & pictures on the ground.

8. Try different shooting angles

We can refer to movies, documentaries or aerial photographs of others and learn different angles and capture track. Through lots of practice, you will find your own style.

Motor and ESC, the Power Base of UAV drone - part 1

Quadcopter drone UAV power includes motor, ESC, propeller, power battery. Among them, the motor and ESC are the essential factors. Today, we'll simply popularize the basics about drone motors and ESCs to those who are fancy about drones or those who are not familiar with drones but are interested in them. By category, UAV's power can be divided into brush power and brushless power. That is, a brush motor with a brushed ESC, a brushless motor with a brushless ESC.

1. Motor

Brush Motor: Early motor let the carbon brush touch the copper head so that the motor can be scrolled. However, after high-speed rolling, it will bring the carbon brush wear, therefore, carbon brush needs to be replaced quite often. At the same time, the copper head will wear too, so in the era of brush motor, the contestants in addition to replace the carbon brush, they also need to polish the copper head, so that the copper head will keep lubricating.

Brushless motors: Brushless motors come into being due to the inconvenience of brush motors, so basically, the drone quadcopter nowadays is the brushless motor quadcopter. The principle of a brushless motor is that the coil around the stator, and then the rotor made of magnets, rolling the magnet, not the coil, so there is no carbon brush consumable. Since the coil is fixed, then how to make the coil changes the magnetic field? Brushless ESC offers the coil group corresponding power supply to generate the corresponding magnetic field driving the magnet on and on. So the brushless motor needs to corporate with the brushless motor esc. Some brushless motor ESCs have safe power function. So regardless of the throttle stick in any position, the motor will not start immediately. And with the Throttle Calibration function, it adapts to different remote throttle travel difference, improves throttle response linearity, with a smooth, delicate feel and excellent speed linear speed.

Summary: Whether the quadcopter motor is the brushless motor or the brush motor, the fundamental principle is to generate a magnetic field through the coil and then deploy a permanent magnet to drive the rotor to roll.

Motor and ESC, the Power Base of UAV drone - part 2

UAV's main source of power components is motor, in addition to the motor, Electronic Speed Controller, abbreviation ESC, is also very important. Electronic Speed Controller, referred to as ESC, its role is that based on the flight control signal, it changes the battery DC input into a certain frequency AC output, used to control the motor speed.

2. ESC

Brush ESC: Brush ESC is used to control the brush motor speed. Brush ESC usually needs only 4 wires, 2 wires are the input power terminal, received positive and negative. The other two wires are manipulated motor speed output, connected to the motor electrodes. After changing the current / voltage and conduction direction can be completed on the speed and control.

Brushless ESC: Similarly, the brushless esc is the brushless motor speed controller. Brushless ESC input is also 2 wires connected to the positive and negative power supply. However, the output of brushless ESC requires 3 wires. As mentioned above(part 1), this is because brushless motors rely on three wires to constantly change the magnetic field to drive the rotor to roll.

Models of Brushless ESC: There are many types of brushless ESC on the markets now, like the 20a brushless motor, 30a brushless motor, 40a brushless motor, which are quite common. I will list some examples for you so that you will know the differences between these brushless motors in a better and clearer way.

1. FVT LittleBee 20A ESC BLHeli OPTO 2-4S Supports OneShot125 (no BEC)

This 20a esc has 20A Continue Current and 25A Burst Current up to 10S, and its Input Voltage is 2-4S Lipo, which is a small volume, lightweight, fast response, best Mini multi ESC for RC Drone FPV Racing Multi Rotor.

2. XXD HW30A 30A Brushless Motor ESC

This 30a esc brushless motor speed controller has the Power 5.6V - 16.8V input,2A BEC, and 30A Constant current (Max 40A Burst Current less than 10 seconds). It has Safe power function, Throttle Calibration function, Low Voltage Protection function.

3. FMS Predator 40A Brushless ESC With 3A Switch BEC T TX60 Plug

5.5V/3A BEC Switch System can reduce BEC damaged as overload current and the 32 bits high-performance controller can improve running speed. This 40a esc has 45A Continuous operating current, 50A 50Sec Full load operating current and 55A 10Sec Maximum operating current. 

Motor and ESC, the Power Base of UAV drone - part 3

On the last part, we talked about different brushless ESC models and show you the differences between three brushless ESC models. I guess you have noticed the differences like the current and the voltage, and you also noticed there is a parameter called BEC. Do you know about the BEC? If you are curious about it, keep reading the part 3 which is the last part of this series.

3. BEC

In addition to the motor, the receiver, flight controller, steering gear and others of the brushless quadcopter all need power supply, and most of them need the 5-6V working voltage, while the model battery voltage is 7.4V (2S) above, directly connect such high voltage to the receiver will certainly burn it, so we need to drop the battery voltage to about 5V. Since the ESC is connected to the battery, it is better to integrate the buck regulator function into the ESC, which is called Battery Eliminate Circuit (BEC). The esc speed controller with BEC can directly supply power to the receiver and so on.

UAV drone now commonly use two categories ESC, one is with BEC ESC, one is OPTO without BEC photoelectric switch. As mentioned above, BEC has the ability to split power supply, the power battery voltage can be changed to 5V voltage, to supply power to the flight controller. If the flight controller does not use ESC with BEC, you need to install a separate power supply for it( or use a UBEC).

Note

You can also use a Servo Tester Server Electronic Speed Controller which is a test device and can easily detect the clearance, jitter, and median of all kinds of Servo (server). It can easily connect the ESC and test the working status of the ESC or Motor to make sure they are operating normally. It can connect three sets of servos or ESCs at the same time, using SCM to control with good stability and high accuracy. The ESC built-in BEC or UBEC will provide power to the servo tester. When you use the ESC with built-in BEC, no additional power supply will be needed, just connect the servo or ESC that you want to test to begin testing.