Page 35 of The Sailor in Polynesia
With the second battery installed, Jonas helped me launch the drone again. This time I kept the controller and took a few more shots ofWelinaby herself and the two boats together. I pressed the record button and filmed my standard shots: panning along the beach, 360-degree rotations around the anchorage, and then it was time for the last shot, a dronie.
“Come here.” I gestured for Jonas to follow me to the bow. The drone hovered ahead of us, and I tugged at Jonas until he was exactly where I wanted him. “Okay, stay right there.” I bent down and put the controller on the deck. Pressing the special program button, I quickly straightened and slid an arm around Jonas’s waist. “Smile and wave!”
He leaned in closer, wrapping his arm around my shoulders and squeezing me in close. I laughed and we both waved at the drone. Three seconds later it tilted and sailed off toward the sky. We stayed still, watching until it was a tiny speck in the blue. Jonas’s thumb brushed quickly against my skin and he pulled back.
I bent over and picked up the controller. “This shot is going to be awesome sped up.”
“It is surreal for me. I have seen your drone footage so many times, and now I get to see it behind the scenes.”
I laughed. “It’s nothing special.”
“That is not true. Many other YouTubers have lost their drones. You have not lost even one. Right?”
I shrugged. “I’ve been lucky. Now help me land this thing.”
Once the drone was safely on the boat and put away, I pulled out my laptop. “Let’s check out our work.”
Jonas sat next to me and I transferred the files to my hard drive. He peered over my shoulder as I clicked on the first picture.
He glanced at me before looking at the screen. “It is... very gray, no?”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I shot in a gray profile, and we need to add a LUT to the image.”
Jonas shook his head. “I do not understand.”
“It’s technical, I know. Sorry. Hold on.”
I opened my photo-editing software and applied the adjustments I needed to make on the first photo. Next to me, Jonas inhaled a sharp breath. “Wow.”
I grinned at him. “Our boats look pretty good together, right?”
The pictures were stunning.WelinaandEiksat in a field of aquamarine that stretched out behind them. I opened all the photos we took, quickly adjusting each one as I went.
“These are amazing.” He had me scroll through them again, admiring each one. “Now the videos?”
The video clips took longer to load, but I got them added in the software and we watched the first clip I’d taken.
“It is so slow. Why is that?”
“In my full videos, I usually speed the drone shots up. Otherwise, yeah, they are really slow. Hang on.”
I added the dronie clip in and let it play. I watched myself jump up from pressing the button and slide my arm around Jonas. My eyes had been on the drone, so I hadn’t noticed it, but Jonas had turned his head and looked at me, and that look...
He looked so happy.Welooked so happy. My hair had been tossed by the light breeze, and my ponytail had flowed over his shoulder. It was a fleeting moment on the screen, but I wanted to watch it again and again to see the way he looked at me.
Jonas was still looking over my shoulder at my laptop, his body a warm weight grazing my back. I heard him swallow, right next to my ear, and a blush warmed my cheeks.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll just speed this up to eight hundred percent. See, now it’s ten seconds long.”
Even without the look, it was ten incredible seconds of footage. By the end,WelinaandEikwere two tiny dots in the lagoon.
“This is amazing,” Jonas whispered. I kept working on the photos, cropping, straightening, and adjusting the colors until I had a finished product: one of Jonas’s shots of our two boats together.
“Okay, let me get a thumb drive so you can have a copy.” I got up and dug through my desk, looking for a drive.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
