It has been frigid, frigid cold, but the wind was non-existent today so I took my little Tello drone outside for a test flight. Up until now, I have mostly been flying it at about 5-10 feet off the ground so I could really practice steering with the controls (and been keeping at that) but today I decided to test out how high it could go and mess around with the photography functions.
As I mentioned before, the DJI Tello is a little toy drone I am learning steering on. Camera wise, it has a simple 5MP front facing camera that’s only capable of looking where the drone looks, so it’s obviously limited in it’s capability. Up until now, I had snapped a few selfies and the like, basically at ground level and really only examples of me understanding what the controls do.
Up until now, I have also been a bit afraid of letting the Tello go too high. I didn’t feel I really had the control of it in the event something went wrong. However with the addition of the gamepad controller, I am feeling a WAY more comfortable with keeping my eyes on the drone while manipulating the flight controls, so I decided to wing it.
First thing I learned: I had read the Tello could only go 30 feet off the ground, but I had naively thought that was “about 30 feet off the ground”. As it turns out, the drone itself prevents going higher then 9.8 meters (which is about 30 feet). This actually made me feel a lot more confident I wasn’t going to have a drone flying 50 feet in the air unresponsively, which was my nightmare scenario since the Tello doesn’t have any of the return to home features of it’s big brothers and sisters.
Second thing I learned: The views and photographs are MUCH better at even that height then I had been taking. I immediately got a few nice shots after playing around with some angles.
The photos do come out a little grainy, as you would expect from a simple 5MP camera, but not at all bad compare to what I had expected.
Finally, I tried one more thing. Mrs. Penaug (who has a much better eye for photos then me) suggested I try at sunset to take the skyline photo again. I did, and after messing with Lightroom it did seem to make a smoother image.
Final verdict: the Tello is definitely limited in what it can do with photos, but it did get a few decent shots. They get a bit grainy and it’s tough to line them up right, but it was a fun experience to play with, and I’ll likely try and bring it to some other locations to test it out more.
