The sight of and stepping foot in the same dungeons where slaves were kept during the slave trade at the Elmina Castle is a heart-wrenching experience. It was my first time in Elmina as a town/city, and the first for me, at the ancient castle, built in the 1400s. It’s old!
If you’re looking for the history of the castle, See the Wikipedia Article
Our tour guide, Martin, did a great job of impressing on our minds how terrible the slave trade experience was. His narration was on point, and carried the weight of the atrocities that occured.
It was a day trip with Ishmael (YouTuber), Kafui (Filmmaker & Photographer) and Ray (YouTuber) to a few other places in the Central Region of Ghana. The Elmina Castle was one of our stops.
As usual, as YouTubers who make drone videos and a Photog in our midst, our goal was to document our experience and fly some drones, capturing the stops we went to, namely, the Elmina Castle, the Cape Coast Castle, and the Fort Williams Castle.
Ishmael was our chief chauffeur, tour guide and instructor for the trip.
First Stop
Our first stop was the Elmina Castle, where we had to pay a fee to capture video. Yes, there’s a special fee required before one is allowed to record video of any kind.
For peace of mind, we paid, and carried on with the tour group for some time, before we all took detours to set up our rigs for capturing the drone shots.
As usual, I usually have to spend the longest amount of time setting up my FPV. It can be it can be a handful of checklist trying to get the right settings and double checking and making sure everything is right and safe to fly. By the time I was done setting uup my FPV, the DJI folks pick their drones out of their cases and within minutes they are up in the sky.
In my case I had to even blow up one propeller simply because when I was taking off I hit hit my leg and the blade just went shattering right and there. But as always I go with spares, I have everything set up ready to replace any parts that breaks and so it was super easy right on there with my toolset replacing the blade and switching over from the five blade to three blade which I had a complete set.
The ducts were damaged too, so I had to replace it. I had spare too.
By the time I was done setting up the FPV and going airborne, I guess Ishmael was already done with flying his first battery so it was quite a bit of time for me to setup.
But was able to get shots indoors with flying through the dungeon with the drone managed to get a few more shots that are a bit unique and haven’t been shot like that before.
To the Beach
From there we wanted to get some beach shots and you know some shoreline shots. We thus went just a bit farther away from the Elmina Castle; there’s this beautiful beach. The weather was great, the beach was super clean with blue skies to take some drone shots
A link to download all that shots for free is on the Experience Ghana Today stock page right here. Since there was a lot of rocks at the beach, it made our shots even more beautiful.
Conclusion
In the next article, will touch more on the experience of visiting the Cape Coast Castle, and the subsequent, the Fort Williams.
