I came up with an interesting idea - awesome feature for long exposure photography.

The gimbal on the phantom 3 is very stable. The biggest issue for long exposure photography seems to be the YAW axis.

The cause is that the Phantom itself can't be that super stable around its yaw axis, even in a low wind conditions,

and the camera always follows the rotation of the phantom (YAW)!

The solution>>>

The gimbal would "lock" as soon as the shutter button is pressed, while the photo is being taken, the gimbal wouldn't follow the yaw of the quadcopter! (this is usually just a few degrees or even less so the gimbal is surely able to counteract)

I believe this would be an awesome feature!
Please share your ideas about this.
Thank you

The P3 can be very stable. Here is 13 minutes of hovering condensed into 37 seconds.. This was in 10x MPH wind next to the sea. Apart from a little movement/drift at the end, its very stable. Not sure what it would do with a LE photo but I'm sure it would be better than anything I could do by hand..

Wow your video is really stable. I haven't had that much luck. I've tried to take a lot of long EV shots, some of them are good, some even better, but this was the only problem I've encountered during shooting long EV photos ---> the yaw axis.

The gimbal can do much better than the phantom itself, and it would give us much sharper long exposure photos. :-)

sploodge Posted at 2015-10-13 07:53
The P3 can be very stable. Here is 13 minutes of hovering condensed into 37 seconds.. This was in 10 ...

Nicely done.

Truth is i'm having other issues as well - gimbal not centered (the camera is looking a few degrees to the left), gimbal horizon is off a bit - sometimes.

But anyway imagine a more windy situation when you want to take a 5second long exposure photo, nowadays you would probably get some yaw drift, it's normal for the quadcopter fighting a wind to move or rotate a bit, but the camera shouldn't follow the yaw rotation of the phantom during that 5 seconds while the shutter is opened. (it can be optional) There's plenty of space (without getting legs into the view) for the camera to move to both left or right to compensate for the slight yaw rotations of the quadcopter. :-) It would surely create much better and sharper long exposure photos.

sploodge Posted at 2015-10-13 19:53
The P3 can be very stable. Here is 13 minutes of hovering condensed into 37 seconds.. This was in 10 ...

Great, you are !!!   The best example of Tripod in the air....