Nighttime drone photography using a cube light

- Selfies are for wimps. Real photographers self light. From now on, I am going to always be followed around by this dramatic lighting thanks to my aerial lighting drone that I built myself. This thing's great. This is just a DJI Phantom 2 with a light stuck on it. It's drifting a little bit 'cause it's windy out here. Several months ago on the Practicing Photographer I introduced to you the idea of drones as lighting platform, but I didn't really give you any specific equipment recommendations.

I'm gonna do that here now because I found a really cheap, really effective way to make a drone that's ideal for still shooting. We got a lot of light coming out of this thing. It may not look like it on video, but when you're working with a still camera, this is a tremendous lighting platform for doing some really cool aerial lighting effects at night. Let's go inside now and take a look at what I've done to make this work. (drone buzzing) I got two drones here, so I can show you a before and after, but before we get to the modification, I wanna show you the light.

This is it, it's tiny. This is the LumeCube, that's L-U-M-E-C-U-B-E and I think that's just LumeCube.com. I'm just very impressed with this. It's a little LED light. Simple controls, there's a button on the top that turns it on, and this lets you dial it up and down. There's another button that lets you control Bluetooth because I can have Bluetooth control of this light, and actually drive its brightness from my phone. Here we go, it's getting dimmer. These things are rechargeable. There's a USB port on the back.

If I just unscrew this, there's a little micro-USB. It charges pretty quick. Now it's flashing, what's going on? What have I done? It holds a charge for a long time. It's a little stubborn to go off apparently. It doesn't weight very much. It actually weighs less than a GoPro. Here we go, here's the micro-USB in the back, water tight lid. It weighs less than the GoPro, so it's ideal for the drone. It actually means I'm gonna get a little more battery life out of my drone than when I'm flying around with a GoPro. It's got a standard tripod screw on the bottom and this is the key to getting it mounted.

Good solid metal. Probably three hours out of a charge when it's fully gassed up, so it's very, very flexible. Ideal for sticking on a drone. 79 bucks off of the LumeCube website. I think I even saw them, maybe they're selling these at Walmart now. So the trick is how do you get it attached to your drone? This is a Phantom 2, I don't know if they still make this one, but they make lots of variations of it. This one has a gimbal built on the bottom. This is the Zenmuse gimbal, it came with the Phantom 2.

This all has to come off. So this is where the GoPro goes. This is the computer that's controlling the gimbal. This is the mount for the gimbal. The mount comes off. You don't have to disassemble it. The mount comes off with four screws. There's one here, one here, and then two on the bottom. If you take those screws out, this whole thing just drops off. You might wanna do a little disassembly. Actually, you still don't have to. You take this off, and then you can use this thing as a template for where to put screw holes in the plate that you're gonna make on your new drone.

So here's the finished thing here. It's pretty simple. This is just a piece of aluminum, not very wide, that's been bent at 90 degrees. You can easily do that in a vice. Just get a thin piece of aluminum, stick it in the vice, you can bend it in half with no problem at all. It's attached to another metal blade. This is just a piece of scrap metal. So by taking this mount and setting it on this piece of scrap metal, it was possible to find out exactly where the screw holes go, and then you need a way to screw this bracket into this piece of metal. So you need another hole there.

We've also epoxied it on here just to get it all very, very sturdy. This easily removes just with these same four screws that hold the gimbal on. Then we just got a hole up here. This is a standard thread size so I just got a bolt here, and a washer, and a couple of lock washers, and this goes into here. The other washers go on the other side, obviously.

Now I've lost my threads, woah. This screws on here. Now this gives you a couple of things that are really nice. Very, very easy to get on and off, which is important if you want to get it off quickly and recharge it. I'm talking about the light. I can pull the light off separately. You can see how easily I'm getting this on here. I can get the light, I can just pull the light off of the mount normally very easily. There we go. No, I didn't get that threaded straight.

This is really no problem in the design. It's just me being uncoordinated. Simple Allen head to screw that on. The whole mount itself comes off very easily so if I ever wanna put my camera gimbal back on, I can. More importantly, this gives me options. Right now it's pointing straight down. So the type of light that you saw earlier in this video is very easy to achieve. I just fly it up over me and it shines straight down. You saw what a big pool of light this thing will cast. It puts out a tremendous amount of light. With low light sensitivity in the camera, it really counts for a lot.

But I can also tilt it and lock it down. So if I wanna shine it forward on something, I can do that. So a very, very, very simple mount that makes a big difference. I've been flying these things around, shooting stills and some video with them for a while, and it's fun. But I gotta say I'm more excited about the lighting options than I ever was about the shooting options. The GoPro gets a little frustrating for me to shoot with 'cause it's so wide. But this has been really fun to get out and be able to light stuff up at night, and see stuff that I normally wouldn't be able to see.

Very inexpensive light, throws out a ton of light. I've got phone control if I wanted. I've got an easy to create mount. You can do this out of scrap metal if you've even got any lying around. Very easy to get all these pieces at Home Depot, or Lowe's, or something like that. In a future Practicing Photographer, we're actually gonna take this out and shoot it, and you can see what the issues are once you get this up in the air and start trying to expose.