Category Photography

2020 Fall Foliage Drive

Tony Yang October 22, 2020 0 Comments Photography

We have an annual tradition to take a group drive during peak Fall foliage season to enjoy the beautiful scenery and to discover new windy and twisty roads around New Jersey/New York. With all the bad news this year and isolation, it was great to finally be among our friends again outdoors and safely distance in our own cars for an epic drive. Olya and I spent days planning the route, taking test drives with our daily driver, and researching endless possible roads and stops on Google maps to make sure the experience was top notch for everyone.

One of my favorite things about living in Sussex county is the endless windy country roads any direction I drive, without any of the traffic or pot holes I battled with out East in Bergen or Passaic county. It’s a joy to drive every single time. I wanted to make sure our friends really experienced the fun we have living here.

As usual, we packed a trunk full of photo and video gear to document every aspect of the drive. We love getting rolling shots for each car so our friends can have a memorable keepsake of their ride whether they keep it for three years or ten. Not only do we make sure the drive is fun, but also enjoy all the stops along the way. From local farms to breweries, we have them all here! This was also the first year we’ve created a brochure special to our private group drive, hard to top this next year, but I’m already looking forward to it!

Stay tuned for the video!

SEASONS One Year Project

Tony Yang October 17, 2019 0 Comments Photography

I have a lot of fun flying my drone around the world on my travels, but I thought it would be just as beautiful to film where I live. Thanks to the third-party app Litchi, I can pre-program waypoints for my DJI Mavic Pro, and have it repeatedly fly the same route over and over. I thought this would be a perfect way to get a change in seasons through out the year from different parts of my neighborhood. I setup a few locations where I would like to go back and film, somewhere convenient but still scenic. I was able to use a combination of Google Earth and Litchi Mission Hub to plan all my flights at home, then run test flights in the real world to make minor tweaks. Once I was happy with the flight plan after many attempts, while holding my thumb very closely to the controller’s pause button in case the path led me straight into a tree, I started showing up at all the locations and just hit the play button to let the Mavic do its thing. Long story short, after a year’s worth of footage, I was happy enough to start editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.

The most tedious task was the manually align all the footage to match. The GPS on the Mavic is good, but not perfect. A lot of the footage are misaligned due to inaccurate GPS coordinates by a few feet, and that could lead to very different footage when the objects are so close to the camera. Any minor changes cause a big difference in perspective when trying to align videos. Unfortunately my recordings were not high res enough that scaling clips up to match other clips led to soft parts in the video. This will be fixed in the next project with UHD 4K recording!

I’ve since moved to a new county, and with that comes new scenery and new flight plans. Please enjoy!

Crazy Rich Chai

Tony Yang October 29, 2018 1 Comment Pets, Photography

Probably one of my favorite movies of 2018 is Crazy Rich Asians for many reasons. One of the reasons is how much I loved Awkwafina’s character in the movie. Her personality doesn’t fit the stereotypical role of how one might expect an Asian woman to act – she is fiesty, loud, and absolutely hilariously uncensored. All the traits I would imagine my little Chai Latte if she were a hooman. Chai’s not your typical Shih Tzu, she’s got more energy and some might even call her a crazy dog, which is why we love her so much. It wasn’t hard to decide to choose Awkwafina’s character Peik Lin in the movie as Chai’s costume. Her cute bunny shirt was the centerpiece.

4 Seasons 4 Months 4 Countries

Tony Yang July 17, 2018 0 Comments Photography, Vacation

Earlier in 2018 we spent a lot of time traveling between multiple countries around the world. I was fortunate to be able to bring my DJI Mavic Pro everywhere with me and flew without any issues. With the array of topography and hemispheres, we drove through all 4 seasons within the 4 month travel period. When I finally arrived back home and found this awesome new song that I was inspired to make this video. The video includes scenes from back home in the U.S., Greece, Ukraine, and South Africa.

Greece South to Santorini

Tony Yang June 5, 2018 0 Comments Photography, Vacation

After the first half of our Greece trip going north, we headed south towards our next destination, Santorini! On our way down, we stopped by The Rhion Fortress with a great view of the Rion-Antirion Bridge, and thanks to Google, we found a little restaurant along the way called Fast Food Pitta Bomb. The drive there was slightly suspicious as the mini island town looked a little run down and empty. We have to remember it was low season so it didn’t feel like a popular destination, but the ratings were good so we gave it a go. At roughly $2 per gyro, it was one of the best we’ve had so far! Olya said she could’ve eaten two. With our tummies happy, we were ready to get back to Athens.

Greece North to Metsovo

Tony Yang May 16, 2018 1 Comment Photography, Vacation

Our trip to Greece was made possible by my wife finding a great deal through The Points Guy. She purchased the tickets last year for our March trip, which is low season for Greece. We planned to stay on the mainland for most of the time, and a few nights on Santorini island. My initial hesitation came from not being too excited about Greek food or knowing what the sights would be like – I’m not much for archeology and manmade sights. I was excited, however, about flying my DJI Mavic Pro outside of the country for the first time after a few months of practice.

We did our research for flights to Santorini from Athens, and decided to purchase through Ryanair. They are one of the most popular budget commuter airlines in Europe, and everything goes smoothly as long as you do your due diligence reading the restrictions – or prepare to pay hefty fees. We learned the hard way with our first budget airline experience with WOW Air going to Iceland. Make sure your personal or carry-on meets the exact size requirements to the millimeter, and it’s worth paying extra for the priority boarding and carry-on bag. Boarding passes must also be printed out on your own – they charge extra for e-tickets issued on your mobile!

Our experience in Greece was not what we had expected, although we did not have much to expect at all. The first item on the itinerary on any trip is to pick up our rental car, a BMW 1 series diesel. Efficient and comfortable little guy with solid driving dynamics compared to the cheap econoboxes we usually get. We reserved this car for 4 days at a whopping $83 USD. That was the first clue that this trip could end up pretty inexpensive! Except for the hotels in Santorini that were pre-booked, we would book all of our accomodations in Greece last minute so we could drive and explore wherever my little drone would take us.

The Story of the Lost Mavic

Tony Yang November 28, 2017 9 Comments Photography

This is a story of how I could’ve prevented this “adventure” of ours if I had just followed the warnings and RTFM.

If any of you really knew me, you would know that I am a late adopter of technology for many reasons. I prefer to wait for the prices to go down on the novelty of the item and the competition driving the prices down. I also like to wait until it’s been tried and tested so the kinks have been worked out or there are enough firmware updates to solve any major issues. I’ve always been curious with drones, but not being a professional videographer did not justify an expensive toy for me where I couldn’t make the money back. It was with the encouragement of my wife to make more recreational videos that I decided rent the DJI Mavic Pro from Unique Photo for a weekend at the Poconos. After a successful and very fun first weekend with the drone, I decided to jump the gun and make the purchase. To feel more comfortable about flying an expensive wonder of technology around in the real world, I decided to spend hours flying simulations to get acquainted with the controls before I ever touched my first drone controller.

Starfleet Doggo

Tony Yang October 26, 2017 1 Comment Pets, Photography

It’s that time of year again when I dress up my Chai Latte in a ridiculous outfit that she just loves. This year instead of buying a pre-made outfit, I’ve decided to learn to hand sew a costume just for her. I learned the basic backstitch for the overall jumpsuit, and fabric glue for the accents.

This year, Chai Latte is a Starfleet Doggo on the USS Shenzhou. Since Chai is a Shih Tzu, it would only be fitting that she accompanies a Chinese ship and captain. Her outfit is my interpretation of what an official attire for a doggo officer would look like, following accurate cues from the show’s outfit. Unfortunately the Shenzhou was destroyed in the very first episode, it turns out NCO Chai Latte escaped on a pod and will continue to serve on the Discovery. I can’t wait for the next costume and improved sewing skills!

How To Format Your Photo Backup Drive

Tony Yang September 14, 2017 0 Comments Photography

As my NAS (network attached storage) drives are getting full from RAW photos, I need to offload the files onto multiple external drives for safe storage. I purchased a few Seagate Expansion drives in 2TB and 4TB variants for different backups, making two copies each for redundancy. The first decision when getting the new drives was how to format them. I decided to use exFAT table for maximum compatibility for read and write on Windows and Mac systems. The default NTFS table is read-only for Macs. The second decision was harder, what file allocation unit size? Most searches on Google just recommended the default size, which would be 4096kb on the 4TB drive. That was a bad idea and a waste of valuable disk space. I was able to recover a lot more with a simple calculation.

Test Driving the BMW i8

Tony Yang September 13, 2017 0 Comments Automotive, Photography

While not the fastest car on paper, the BMW i8 is one of the most futuristic production cars in my opinion. Perhaps it’s more of a proof of concept in production, and is only the first generation from BMW. I didn’t think I would get a chance to actually test drive one anytime soon, but luckily we found one to play with for an hour so we made a run to Starbucks. Olya and I took turns on each leg of the trip, she being the fearless one pushed it harder while I did more inspection on the build of the electric hybrid sports car.