Whale Watching with Phantom = Awesome Footage

[StatiK RC]

This is possibly my favorite video I have shot, but it was ultra stressful to create. Thankfully the weather conditions in San Diego (near La Jolla) that day were as close to perfect as possible. The Whales in the video are grey (gray whatever) whales and the go south to mexico in the winter to mate. You can actually see island things off in the distance that are in mexican waters. we ended up seeing around 27 whales tis trip but i wasnt quite able to capture them all. The ipad decided to not run the DJI GO app (has this happened to annyone else?) so I was forced to use my iphone. It was nearly impossible to see them with all of the glare off the ocean. I got lucky a few times though . what do you think?

 

[PsyBorg]

Wow what a gorgeous day that looks like it was. If I didn't know better I would say that was shot on a lake it was so calm out there. You managed to get some great shots even with the handicap of phone vs larger screen. That shot of the dolphins playing tag and racing alongside the boat was a really good segment.

 

[JimCR120]

Wow is right. What a day you had!

I am very curious how many batteries you went through just on the Phantom.

 

[earthsciteach]

Fantastic video! Well done!

 

[StatiK RC]

Thank you so much for the positivity! My friend actually got the shot of the dolphins in slow motion, so it was great to work with. earthsciteach I filmed this over a period of 2 days, and used six batteries to get all of the footage. I ended up running out of sd card space because I shot it in 2.7k, but I would have done it any other way because of the ability to "crop in" on some of the other shots. I honestly had a lot more fun filming the boats than the whales, but that might have something to do with actually being able to see the boats The calm ocean was fantastic!!!

 

[StatiK RC]

Some other shots..

 

[JimCR120]

6 batteries, I suspected there were more than just a few.

 

[StatiK RC]

haha yeah! I only have three batteries for the phantom, so I would charge them at night. We also used one battery in the DJI spark. The spark was surprisingly great at capturing footage. The footage from the spark is at around 2:30 in the video. When editing the lack of yaw stabilization is REALLY aparent..