Inspire

- On a previous Practicing Photographer you saw me out in the desert in Nevada, flying around taking landscape still photos using a drone. A DJI Phantom. I really like that drone and GoPro combination as a still photography tool, particularly for landscape shooting. It lets met get a perspective that I normally can't have because I'm normally not hovering around up in the air. Since we made that video, though, DJI has announced something really cool. Not just announced, released something really cool. It's DJI Inspire. It's a new drone, it's pricier than the Phantom but it's got some really cool, really useful features.

First of all, as you can see it looks very different. It's a radically different design with these cool moving props. They start out in one position, but once it gets up in the air, they shift into this other position. What's nice about that is it means that they're never going to get in the shot. One thing that can be very frustrating about the Phantom is because the wind could catch it and move it around sometimes the props would actually dip into the shot. So you might come back with a picture that was otherwise fine except you could see part of the drone in it. With the Inspire you don't have that problem.

What's really cool about their design is that the thing has automatic ground sensors in it, so as it's getting lower it knows when to automatically lower what's basically it's landing gear so you don't have to worry about trashing your camera, which is mounted at the bottom. These ground sensors also mean that the thing is really capable of flying indoors, something that normally is extremely difficult to do well because you don't get the GPS lock and it's just really easy to crash. This things much, much, much easier to fly. It's beefier, it's broader, that means it's incredibly stable when it's in the air.

Again, particularly for landscape shooting, which is just about the only thing I do with it, I'm usually out somewhere really windy. This makes a huge difference. They've extended the flight time with better batteries, you can now get 18 minutes. One of the reasons that they've done that is improvements in battery technology but also it's now got an integrated camera in it. DJI really knows how the whole system goes together you don't bolt a GoPro onto the bottom anymore, you use their camera. It's a built in 12 megapixel camera with a 20mm equivalent lens, equivalent to 35mm lenses.

It's a really nice, wide angle lens, very good quality. Probably the coolest thing about it is it's got a built in first person view system, built in FPV. In the Practicing Photographer I was talking about you saw that I had rigged an FPV system that worked with an outboard monitor, but that required sautering stuff into the drone and doing a bunch of other stuff that was very complicated. With the Inspire it works like the earlier DJI Vision, you use an iOS or Android device as your monitor and a WiFi connection to the drone so you have a nice view finder of exactly what the onboard camera is seeing but you also get a bunch of cool telemetry from the drone, you get altitude and speed and all this other stuff.

This thing is fast, it can go up to 70 mph, I don't know what good that is, but it's really cool. About the only thing I can say bad about this new model is that I really want one and as I said, they're pricey so you might have difficulty justifying this unless you really have a professional use for it. But, as with most digital photography related stuff, though this is pricey now it is going to come down, it's inevitable. Even if you're not interested in getting one of these it's worth checking out just to see what your possible future as a drone photographer might be.