Photography

I was a pretty serious architectural photographer and had quite a bit of success with it. Often I just needed a slightly higher point of view, and so I would use a seven foot tripod, a ladder, or sometimes a tall pole. For sure, a drone with a decent camera would help a lot and would be well worth it, and my late father, who was even more technically oriented than me, encouraged it. So one Christmas, my dad and a lady friend both got me inexpensive drones, one with a camera, and one without. I started with the cameraless one for practice, and quickly realized that even though my house had a one acre lot, the trees were too large to make this practical. The drone went off course, hit a tree branch, crashed, and a couple rotors broke. I replaced the rotors, went to a park—but no park was really large enough—and quickly smashed it. I took the other drone to a park by the river: up it went, and the wind took ahold of it, and it went flying way up river, where it plummeted to a parking lot, and smashed into many small pieces, and I was unable to recover the memory card. So I had about a total of a minute’s fun before destruction. Much later, my wife’s uncle, who is a drone enthusiast, demonstrated his self-flying drone, which was impressive, but by that time I really couldn’t justify it anymore.