This was my last island aerial video this trip, and the only one I’ve done at sunset to early evening. The sun sets pretty early here on Bohol – 6:05PM today – so at 5:35PM I was already ready in front of our beachfront resort for the correct evening lighting to come on. There was plenty of activity along the long stretch of Alona Beach: a fair number of tourists, but what seemed to be an even larger number of locals, including many I suspect who live in Bohol itself coming to enjoy the beach.
I haven’t done a lot of sunset aerial shoots, but one thing I’ve learned is that timing is critical. There’s only a small window where you get a perfect blend of ambient and artificial light e.g. from light sources at the various retail and dining establishments along the beach. As the evening comes, the small sensor on the DJI Mini Pro 4 also starts to struggle with lower available light, and the onscreen readout on the RC-N2 controller showed that ISOs were exceeding 4000. As a result, the resulting video below has a few parts that look a little mushy. Increasingly strong winds were also blowing about – possibly because there might be thunderstorms starting in a few hours. I could see the drone’s camera gimbal and props were working really hard to produce stabilized footage.
This is our last night at Bohol, and there’s really a lot to see and do on the island, especially water activities. I reckon we could have spent another day here in Bohol and checked out some of the snorkeling or helmet diving activities offered by the numerous dive and water activity shops that line the beach. Oh well; perhaps on a future trip!