You don’t need to follow DanOCan.com for long to know that McDougall Memorial United Church is one of my favorite places to visit.  I have been out there for Historic Calgary Week presentations, in the dead of winter, and in the heat of summer.  I have been there with crowds of people and when I have had the whole place to myself, as I did today.

This was the second time I have tried to come out to McDougall Church to take drone footage.  The first time I did not fly due to wind, except for hovering a few feet above the parking area.  With so much snow and cold over the last couple of weeks, my Mavic had been grounded and stuck inside my camera bag.  Today the sun was out, the temperature was back up near the freezing mark, and I was itching to get in the Jeep and go for the short drive towards Morley.

Unfortunately, the closer I got the more I could hear the wind noise coming from outside the vehicle.  Sure enough, I reached the parking lot of the church to find blowing and drifting snow and generally crappy conditions for flying.  Having learned my lesson out in Herronton about flying too far away in the wind, I opted to play it cautiously.  While I did launch and capture some footage this time, I didn’t get all the shots I wanted. However, I didn’t crash nor lose the drone so that counts as a success!

I’m not super happy with the footage.  Because of the wind and the super fast shutter speed (it was running about 1/8000th of a second), I got a lot of “jello” effects and image shudder.  It rendered a number of clips unusable, as did my failure to properly set the white balance.  The wind also played havoc with me when trying to make any sort of smooth camera movements.  The Mavic is a great little drone in the wind, but it was up against its match today.

Certainly a good set of neutral density (ND) filters will be on my ever-growing list of items to purchase.  A slower shutter speed would have helped a lot with the footage today.  Oh well, it is what it is.  I’m not a professional; I’m just a hobbyist out for a good time and to document some of the great historic places I come across.