I figured it was time for a proper introduction. Hello. I'm Rob and for the past 18 years, I've called Northern California my home. I'm originally from the East Coast (Jersey boy) and I made up my mind a long time ago that I will never move back. I'm a photo geek that majored in Photography in the early 90's but somehow ended up as a software engineer at a very large corporation (I'm sure you have heard of it). While my software job pays the bills, I also have been doing photography professionally since around 2000. I currently run my own business shooting high-end dog portraits (trust me, it's an awesome job) and before that I shot adventure sports for magazines around the world.
Throughout my life I have always been into RC and have run the gamut of cars, boats, planes, helicopters and now multis. It's been about 6 years since I sold off all my remaining gear (heli stuff) due to the frustrations of electric technology and the constant despair and repair that comes with flying helicopters. Over the past couple years I have been intrigued with multirotors but never gave it too much thought as I'm a fairly new dad with two little ones and I'm a work-o-holic with both my software and photography jobs. However, this holiday season my photography was really good to me so I told my wife it was time for me to get a new hobby. I spent a few weeks researching and handed my wife a list of everything she needed to get me Christmas. I ended up with a Gaui 500x and a DJI WKM. A few days after Christmas everything was built and I was off flying. Like many of you have experienced, I was hooked after the first flight. Since then I have easily racked up a good 3-4 hours of flight time and if batteries didn't take so much time to charge I probably would have tripled that time. Knock on wood but so far I have had a not a single mishap and my little 500x is getting some serious workouts. Now it's time to get a camera in the air. I'm not all that interested in video but I do have a number of locations I'd like to film. I am interested in FPV as I am (was) a paragliding pilot but gave it up after having my first kid 5 years ago. I think it would be fun to fly around the coast while keeping my feet on the ground. However my ultimate goal is still photography. But this time I don't want to do it for money. Just for personal work. The business side of photography has zapped all the fun away from it. I'm hoping my new hobby will ignite the flame again. Even if it doesn't, I'm having a blast with all the tinkering and flying. It's nice to be back in the RC world. So anyway, I knew from the beginning the Gaui wasn't going to be my final platform. I just needed something to get my feet wet (and oh brother are they soaking wet). :frog:
My new build: after a bunch more research and dreaming (and the sale of a bunch of old photo gear) I pulled the trigger on a new Droidworx AD-4 HL with an AV130 camera mount. I'm moving the WKM from Gaui to the DW and replacing it with a Naza. As it stands this is my build: :tennis:
Droidworx AD-4 HL
DJI WKM
Avroto 2814-11s Motors
APC 12x3.8 Props
Maytech 30A ESC's
AV130 Camera mount
GoPro Hero2 (maybe my Olympus EP-2 if I can get it to fit)
Spektrum DX8
So that's me in a nut shell. If you want to check out my photography (and before you begin making jokes about dog photography), take a look a my website - http://www.murphydogstudios.com. While you are there, be sure to look the "personal work" portfolio which contains some of my favorite images from when I used to shoot for sports magazines (which there is no money to be made).
Cheers!
Rob
Throughout my life I have always been into RC and have run the gamut of cars, boats, planes, helicopters and now multis. It's been about 6 years since I sold off all my remaining gear (heli stuff) due to the frustrations of electric technology and the constant despair and repair that comes with flying helicopters. Over the past couple years I have been intrigued with multirotors but never gave it too much thought as I'm a fairly new dad with two little ones and I'm a work-o-holic with both my software and photography jobs. However, this holiday season my photography was really good to me so I told my wife it was time for me to get a new hobby. I spent a few weeks researching and handed my wife a list of everything she needed to get me Christmas. I ended up with a Gaui 500x and a DJI WKM. A few days after Christmas everything was built and I was off flying. Like many of you have experienced, I was hooked after the first flight. Since then I have easily racked up a good 3-4 hours of flight time and if batteries didn't take so much time to charge I probably would have tripled that time. Knock on wood but so far I have had a not a single mishap and my little 500x is getting some serious workouts. Now it's time to get a camera in the air. I'm not all that interested in video but I do have a number of locations I'd like to film. I am interested in FPV as I am (was) a paragliding pilot but gave it up after having my first kid 5 years ago. I think it would be fun to fly around the coast while keeping my feet on the ground. However my ultimate goal is still photography. But this time I don't want to do it for money. Just for personal work. The business side of photography has zapped all the fun away from it. I'm hoping my new hobby will ignite the flame again. Even if it doesn't, I'm having a blast with all the tinkering and flying. It's nice to be back in the RC world. So anyway, I knew from the beginning the Gaui wasn't going to be my final platform. I just needed something to get my feet wet (and oh brother are they soaking wet). :frog:
My new build: after a bunch more research and dreaming (and the sale of a bunch of old photo gear) I pulled the trigger on a new Droidworx AD-4 HL with an AV130 camera mount. I'm moving the WKM from Gaui to the DW and replacing it with a Naza. As it stands this is my build: :tennis:
Droidworx AD-4 HL
DJI WKM
Avroto 2814-11s Motors
APC 12x3.8 Props
Maytech 30A ESC's
AV130 Camera mount
GoPro Hero2 (maybe my Olympus EP-2 if I can get it to fit)
Spektrum DX8
So that's me in a nut shell. If you want to check out my photography (and before you begin making jokes about dog photography), take a look a my website - http://www.murphydogstudios.com. While you are there, be sure to look the "personal work" portfolio which contains some of my favorite images from when I used to shoot for sports magazines (which there is no money to be made).
Cheers!
Rob
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