Droning Boy: Hong Kong Geopark

It's New Year's Day, and I took the opportunity to get out of the city for some fresh air.  It's been more than 4 months since I last took my DJI Mavic Pro out for a spin, and I desperately wanted to go fly and film around the High Island Reservoir and the Hong Kong UNESCO Geopark.

Unfortunately, the skies had gotten hazy overnight, and what were clear skies yesterday became a little washed out today.  This really sucked, and I knew that the footage would suffer... But I had already made the decision to come out here today instead of yesterday, so that is just bad luck...

The old fogeys didn't want to do the 10km hike from the outer entrance of the park, so we took a taxi all the way to the High Island Reservoir East Dam - bypassing just about all the beautiful scenery along the way.  We got off the cab and I immediately made my way down to the breakwater.  While the others explored the different parts of the park, I spent my time flying the drone since I've already seen all the different rocks a few years ago...

I decided to set exposure to manual today - shooting in 4K resolution at a frame rate of 24 frames/sec and 1/50 sec exposure.  The results weren't perfect, but I'm still learning...

Thanks to my drone, I no longer have to trek across the entire area to get a good look at the hexagonal volcanic rocks.  I actually stayed in the same place and flew the drone to different parts of the park to get a closer view, including these S-shaped columns.

I also gained some brand new perspectives, which I wasn't able to get on my last trip here.  Now I can see Po Pin Chau (破邊洲) - the little island that was split off due to erosion - from the air and from the ocean.  I also got to see those tall, hexagonal columns up close without having to make the climb up to the edge of the cliff.

I spent a good amount of time here, running down all 4 of my drone batteries.  As there were a lot of people waiting for transportation out of here, we decided to call ourselves a taxi and offered up an extra HKD 100 as inducement.  I know the old fogeys definitely didn't want to spend 2 hours to hike out of here, and we certainly didn't want to miss our reservation for dinner...