Minnesota Trip

Mississippi River in Itasca State Park. 1/5 sec. f/14

I recently got back from my camping trip that I mentioned earlier and I had a great time! Unfortunately, the conditions were not appropriate for astrophotography, but I still was able to get some very nice pictures and videos. I was also able to give a few features of my new DJI Osmo Mobile 3 phone gimbal a try.

My friend and I went up to the Fox Lake Campground near Bemidji, Minnesota. We chose this location for the scenic area and the small amount of light pollution for astrophotography.

I had never been camping before this trip. The closest that I had been was spending a night in an RV a few times, but never in a tent. My inexperience became rather obvious during the first night because we thought that the tent was properly set up, but it leaked heavily during a rainstorm in the night and we got pretty wet. After that, we had to dry our sleeping bags on top of the tent for over half a day.

After waking up cold and wet, we decided to go and get McDonald’s for breakfast and figure out our next steps. So we drove into town and stopped at the Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues, which were neat to see and take pictures of. While we were there, the dark skies began to clear and some sunlight shone through and I began to have some optimism for the rest of the day.

After that, we went to Itasca State Park to see the beginning of the Mississippi River. Once we got there, I saw some great opportunities for some slow shutter speeds because there was a lot of fast flowing water. One problem that I faced was that I decided to leave my backpack and tripod in the car, which would limit my use of long exposures. Now, I can usually handhold my SL2 up to 1/8 second speed if I really concentrate, even with my non-stabilized telephoto lens. What I did to compensate for the lack of a tripod was I knelt down and balanced my camera on my knee while using live view to frame the shot.

Once we got back and dealt with the wet tent and sleeping bags, we went kayaking, which was another thing that I never did before and it was very fun. While we were driving and spending time around the campfire, I was able to try out the timelapse features of the DJI Osmo Mobile 3. I was very happy overall with the results, but I had some difficulty using it in the car because I found the gimbal to drift to the left and down while filming. Hopefully I can figure out what is causing that and remedy it so that the gimbal is more useful to me.