A prosperous 2024(?)

Good question. For us, Christmas was the usual hectic mishmash of trying to finish up outstanding jobs before everything (and everyone) shut down, lay some groundwork for the new year, and even get a few days off to enjoy the inevitable hangover. And then onto 2024 – what predictions for the next 12 months?

For beda:photo, 2023 was very much a half full or half empty kind of year (depending on the mood at any one time) with a lot more aerial photography and video work coming our way, but always at short notice and at very competitive prices. There was a lot more work on large scale construction sites, both aerial and ground based. Such locations can be a severe test of man and machine even with professional ground based photographic equipment, but flying a flimsy drone in among the cranes, cherry pickers and steel girders seemed bound to end in tears. In the event, however, it was the Canon DSLRs which took the most beatings, with the drones having no problems at all other than finding safe take off and landing zones on busy building sites. Even flying around between girders in a dimly lit auditorium went off without a hitch, thanks to the impeccable obstacle avoidance system on the Mavic.

 

 

 

As for the coming 12 months, so much is going on out there in the wider world, with wars, elections, recessions and general economic instability all in the pipeline, if not already here, it would be foolhardy to start making too many predictions on the 2nd of January. There are, however, a few things that we can be reasonably sure of:

1. 2024 looks set to be the year of the drone, at least when it comes to high tech warfare in Ukraine. The AFU have announced that they are set to produce over a million UAVs by the end of the year, which is quite remarkable for a country which had no drone industry worth talking about a year ago.

2. Many larger organisations (particularly national and local government) will still be blaming Covid for their inability to get back up to previous levels of effectiveness.

3. England will not be winning the EURO 2024 championships, but please, guys, feel free to prove us wrong.

4. We will all be back here again in 12 months(ish) moaning about what a bad year 2024 was and hoping 2025 will be better!

5. beda:photo will still be zooming around the skies of East Anglia doing our best to create great photos and videos.

DJI Mavic 3 one year on review

It’s almost a year now since beda:photo retired our DJI Inspires and went over to using the DJI Mavic 3, and it has been a busy year for us, so the new kit has certainly been put through its paces. These are our ratings:

IQ (image quality)

At first we were a bit dubious about the slightly odd camera arrangements, two different lenses and very strangely shaped filters, but the system has proven to be very effective in a wide variety of situations. We always knew that the lack of interchangeable lenses would be annoying and the secondary lens is an attempt to compensate for the lack of any form of telephoto facility, and in all fairness it does a pretty good job.

 

In other words, the auxiliary lens is good enough for a lot of basic tasks, but it won’t produce many award-winning images.

The main lens, on the other hand, does produce beautifully crisp images with a very wide dynamic range and masses of detail. The raw images are a delight to work on, with astonishing amounts of flexibility in exposure, colour balance and  contrast. They do seem a bit soft to begin with, but with a bit of sharpening added, they take on a biting clarity which is easily comparable to the Minolta lenses used on Inspires. The camera is of course also a four thirds camera, so a big jump in quality over the previous generation of drone cameras is only to be expected.

Ease of use

When it comes to ease of use this little drone is in a class of its own. There is virtually no preparation required, just pull it out of the bag, unfold the legs and that’s it. Brilliant. Once in the air the Mavic is equally easy to handle, being very quick and responsive. The speed at which it moves over short distances takes some getting used to if you are accustomed to working with larger machines, even in cine mode, so a light touch is definitely needed. 

Battery life

Firstly, we were extremely relieved to discover that the initial massive charging time of anything up to 8 hours appears to be a once-only phenomenon, with a much more acceptable hour or so being the norm. We don’t normally run batteries down below 20%, so this can be even shorter. Flight times are still the longest we have worked with, usually around 40 minutes, which is particularly useful on large construction sites where one is often working at maximum range. All of this is good news, particularly as additional batteries are ferociously expensive to buy.

User/customer friendly(?)

A surprisingly important consideration when working in public places or busy construction sites is the reaction of workers, participants and passers by to the presence of a drone. Most people react far more favourably to the Mavic 3 than they ever did to an Inspire hovering a few yards away, which makes working significantly easier. If anything, the Mavic is so quiet and unobtrusive  that wedding guests and workers sometimes have an alarming tendency to walk right up to it to inspect it while hovering, which is not to be encouraged. Certainly, very few are intimidated by it.

Durability

Durability was the big issue as far as we were concerned with the Mavic 3. Our first reaction was that we had swapped some large, well made professional kit for a collection of cheap(er) plastic toys, but one year on it has to be said that the Mavic has performed faultlessly, with no technical issues at all, not even any replacement props, which is unheard of around here. They still sometimes come back covered with blood and the corpses of dead insects when flying in summer, but the usual nicks and scratches don’t seem to be occurring, so no complaints on that score. 

Another pleasant surprise recently was an uninterrupted morning’s work from the top of a 3 storey building flying in temperatures officially recorded at -7 degrees C at ground level. It would have been quite a bit colder at 400 feet. A lot of drones would have refused to fly in those temperatures, or at least issued dire warnings about battery temperatures and working life, but there was not a peep from the trusty Mavic. It just quietly did what it was asked to do without complaint. We are told that drone batteries don’t like it much below 15 degrees, but obviously no one has mentioned this to the Mavic 3, as the battery life and performance were completely normal.

Video

One of the great virtues of the Mavic 3, of course is its video capability. It has to said at this point that we have never had much call for the software bells and whistles which accompany each new drone from DJI, preferring to adopt a totally manual approach to our work. Having said that, however, functions like point of interest and follow me mode have definitely improved since the earlier DJI versions and the tendency for windspeed and direction to reduce efficiency appears to have been mostly eliminated.

From our point of view, the 4k video at 60fps is the big plus, providing greater levels of image quality and flexibility. Adjustable apertures have also rightly been deemed as essential for full control, so there is not much to complain about here. The 5.2K resolution is also great, but does require the fastest micro SD cards and increases processing and workflow times accordingly, so until clients start demanding it we will continue to be more than satisfied with the brilliant 4k footage this camera produces.

Conclusions

This drone doesn’t really have any vices. The DJI Fly app it uses, however, continues to plague the UK user with lots of irrelevant and intrusive ‘health and safety’ information when working in certain areas, even to the extent of inventing non-existent flight regulations and restrictions. And who cares about the latest restrictions about flying around the Emperor’s Palace in Beijing anyway? We certainly don’t.

Minor gripes notwithstanding, however, the Mavic 3 continues to be a great drone and is serving us well, so we would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for professional results from a drone that is remarkably easy to fly and good value for money.

Dreaming of a white Christmas?

The beda:photo Christmas tree is now fully decked out in all its glory but, as usual, the missing ingredient is a suitably festive view from the window. Will we see another white Christmas in the South East? Not if the global warmers are to be believed, as our winters are said to be becoming milder and wetter every year. In this part of the world snow (if it comes at all) usually descends in the first few weeks of the new year, and we have had some brutal snowfalls around here in recent years, with roads cut off and a six day power cut 3 years ago. Not much fun if you live out in the sticks.

Snowboarding

Mustn’t grumble though, and it was a rare treat to watch people snowboarding down the country lanes around here! Looking back over the last few decades it seems to us to be more a case of regular cycles of warm and cold spells, with hot, dry summers being followed by milder winters and cool, wetter summers being followed by harsh winters.

In Essex we have had two blistering hot, drought ridden summers followed by very mild winters in 2019 and 2020, but the summer of 2021 was something of a damp squib by comparison and not exceptionally warm, so the unofficial beda long range weather forecast is predicting a cold winter, but we will have to consult the tea leaves to be absolutely sure.

This is all very interesting, but what is the relevance? Well, imagine waking up to the scene above in 10 years time, when gas, oil and coal fired heating is a thing of the past, only to find that the electricity (your only remaining source of heat, light, cooking and power to work with) is out for six days. And don’t even think about getting into your shiny new electric car to get some emergency supplies!

A storm in the North

At the time of writing this, a storm in the North of England has left thousands of households without power for 8 days. One can only hope that they haven’t been naive enough to put all their eggs in the electricity basket and at least have some alternative form of heating.

Goodbye oil and gas?

For those of you who may be unaware, it is official government policy to begin phasing out oil and gas boilers in 2025, just three years from now, in order to reduce fossil fuel emissions. The idea is to replace fossil fuels with cleaner electricity, which is great as long as you don’t think too hard about exactly how that electricity will be generated.

Currently, 42% of our electricity is generated by gas (yes, a fossil fuel) and coal (yes, another fossil fuel) with 21% being generated by nuclear power and 24% by so-called renewable sources, like wind and solar power. The rest is apparently generated by a mixture of ‘other’ fossil fuels (3.5%) and imports from France. Add to this the fact that all but one of our nuclear power stations are scheduled to be retired by 2035 and it becomes obvious that someone has got his sums wrong.

Disaster round the corner?

There are currently about 28 million households in Britain and if one assumes that most of them run at least one petrol or diesel car and (let’s say) half have oil or gas fired heating, you don’t even have to do the calculations to see that there will be a truly humungous increase in electricity consumption if and when all alternatives are phased out. Looking at how shaky the electricity distribution infrastructure is in rural areas at the moment it’s hard to see anything but disaster round the corner.

Add to all this, of course that so-called renewable energy sources are scheduled to increase to 30% of national output at most. The rest will have to come from a whole new generation of much larger or more numerous nuclear reactors, with all that that entails.

And speaking of alternative energy, human nature being what it is, farmers are now queuing up for planning permission for solar ‘farms’ as an easier and more lucrative alternative to growing food for the nation. In a country that only produces 52% of its own food at the moment, this can only be described as madness.

A much better solution would be mandatory solar panels on the roof of every new house built, no infrastructure, no pylons, no problem. Given the huge housebuilding programme the government has undertaken this could provide a large contribution to the national grid.

The elephant in the room

The problem, as always of course, is the proverbial elephant in the room, the size of the human population, which no one will talk about. Instead, we are required to accept that the UK population can keep on growing continuously without ever reaching the point of unsustainability.

Overpopulation is a very obvious global problem which most people are at least vaguely aware of, but it is quite astonishing that nothing is ever offered in the way of solutions or even discussion from the never ending international summits or from national governments. On the contrary, most western nations seem trapped in the belief that ever growing national economies and the rising populations and massive consumption increases they require can one day be made sustainable.

If the UK currently only produces 52% of its own food that means we are simply exporting our over population problem to other countries, mostly Eastern Europe, South America and the far East. As the new trade deals with New Zealand and Australia begin to take effect the emphasis will shift, but the principle remains the same. At the moment these countries may be content to subsidise our irresponsible policies, but that won’t last forever once they decide they need the spare food for their own expanding populations.

It seems stunningly obvious that if the ship has too many passengers and is in constant danger of sinking, simply moving them around in a vain attempt to stabilise it will eventually end in disaster for all. Allowing even more to climb on board is complete madness.