It is finally Christmas! Well, not yet but it feels like it! This year we cheated a little and we bought ourselves a (very) early Christmas present, the DJI Mini 2! This light-weight travel drone is perfect for us due to its size, quality, easy navigation, price and of course, its weight. Another added bonus is that we don’t have to register this drone or have to do a flight course to be able to fly it! In this blog we want to show you some of our footage and explain how to use this drone.
Unboxing & Specs
We are very patient people, but with some things, like waiting for our new drone, we are not! Luckily DJI knew this and our package arrived within 2 days!!! We were so thrilled to open our present and see for our selves how small and light this drone actually is! The Mini 2 is smaller than our phones and ours weighs less than 249 grams, on our kitchen scale it even weighs only 238 grams! We bought the fly-more combo and this includes some really handy extras like 2 extra batteries and a two-way charging hub, a nice and compact carry bag, and lots of spare parts.
So we don’t want to get too techie but here are some quick specs for the DJI Mini 2; it can shoot in 4k/30 fps video and can provide JPEG and RAW(DNG) photos. The batteries have 31 minutes flight time although this depends on how much wind it has to endure. It has level 5 (29-38kph) wind resistance and has built in smart programs like return to home and quickshots. The mini 2 also has 3 control settings, Cine-mode, Normal and Sports mode. We love to use the cine-mode as it creates more stable and cinematic movements. We only use sports mode when we fly far away and the drone has difficulties returning because of strong winds.
Before the first flight
If you are like us, you will want to go outside and fly away as soon as possible but there are first some important things to do. Firstly, we charged all our batteries, the controller and our phones. Whilst charging we watched some YouTube videos on how to set up the app, area settings, and photo/ video settings. We also had to connect our phone to the drone via the DJI fly app and we recommend doing this at home so you can do all the updates via WiFi. We also removed all the straps and stickers from the drone and checked for damage before flying.
First flight with the DJI Mini 2
The DJI Mini 2 is our very fist drone and it is amazing how easy it was to be able to fly and control this drone. Our first flying day was quite windy but that did not impact the controllability of the drone at all. We started off in a open field without many obstructions like trees or powerlines. This is very important, no one wants to crash their brand new drone on its very first day! We just played around with some basics and continued with the quickshots. Quickshots are pre-programmed movements of the drone to make epic cinematic footage and you don’t need to do a thing. I have a feeling we will be using these a lot, you can view some of our footage on our very first day flying below.
After a very successful first day we couldn’t wait to charge up and fly again. This time we went to a local hill/mountain for sunset. On this day there was almost no wind at all and this reflected very positively as the duration of our flying time increased immensely. During the first half-hour of the sunset we had some challenges with the overexposure of the sun, bleaching the shot. But when the sun met the horizon we were able to shoot some great footage.
We are so happy with this drone and we can’t wait to record so many amazing memories with it. We actually chose to buy the DJI Mini 2 drone instead of going away to Dublin for a few days. This will probably be the first and last time we choose something materialistic over travelling, but the current Coronavirus situation didn’t give us much of a choice! We will probably have to stay home in Wales for a little while so make sure to check out what Wales has to offer here! If you want to see more of our drone, give us a follow on Instagram and stay updated for our best shots and videos! Do you want to get one yourself? Buy it HERE directly from the DJI store!
Travelling Translated
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