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The Expensive Hobby Of Kite Aerial Photography
GoneGaryT writes "The BBC is running a cool article
- strapping your digital camera to a kite and doing D.I.Y. aerial photography. Examples of suitable kites can be found here. Anyone want to try this from the top of an apartment building in London or NY? A pretty accessible pastime, so long as you can afford to lose the lot in a sudden gust!" High-res digital cameras have come down somewhat in price since the last time we mentioned this.
Clever people will get a $50 wired video camera, run the wires down the teather and get some funky video capture software going
a friend of mine during college did something like that for his senior engineering project. his team (composed of a few mech eng's, EE's, and some graphic design majors) basically hooked a camera to a kite and then did some processing on the images to generate some simple 3D imagery of the landscape.
if i find links i'll post 'em, but it's going back several years and the webpages have probably been purged.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I got a rocket camera for Christmas from my brother :-)
estes rockets
It uses a couple of explosive packs and takes a picture at its apex.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
...lying around, try getting the DraganFlyer IV ($750) and mount an EyeCam ($250) on it. The 'flyer looks interesting, as well as the camera. Although, if you don't want to pay out that much, the Super Aviator ($190) looks interesting as well.
We did some aerial shooting using a bunch of helium ballons to carry a cheap,light wireless camera.
We then attached the receiever to a camcorder video in to record the results.
You could just as well use a corded camera (we used the wireless one because we had it) but you would have to allwo for the weight of the wire with an extra balloon or two.
The biggest problem is keeping the camera stable but when there isn't too much wind, the balloons provide a nice platform to hang the camera from.
Been done, for years... I've (and many others) have flown both digital cameras and also x10 and the like wireless video cameras on planes and helis... take a look at http://www.ryankramer.com/planes/avistar.shtml (near the bottom I've got some arial pics)
I attached one of the new x10s to the underside of my front scoop. Got some cool video for a video of the kids "Going to Grandmas"
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
You can make great kites from bamboo, garbage bags and duct tape. The cheap-o rogalo wings scale up just as well as they scaled down to begin with. A large garbage bag or two, with carefully placed duct tape reinforement makes a very large kite, 6 to 9 foot wingspan.
A $100 camera can take good pictures. I've got a nasty old sipix with 1200x1600 resolution that works well. All you really need to worry about is protecting it from the inevitable fall and making a good trigger.
My triggers have used christmas tree lights for a timer. They are light, rugged, cheap and easy. I've used them to fire a solenoid that drew music wire down on the button and to close a relay that did the same thing electronically. This eliminates the need for figuring out how to do things via USB and you get about one picture per second of flight. All you need to worry about is having lots of memory. A 64 MB CF card did well enough for me and a 256 MB would be excellent.
The only thing I've really lacked is time when the wind is blowing. You can see some of this fun and the results here.
When it's all said and done, chances are that you have everything you need to do this already. Go get it! It's lots of fun.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
See bill nelson's ice cube trigger here:
http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/equip/ice.html
Suggested items:
1. kite
2. DISPOSABLE camera
3. Camera rigging for kite
4. ice cubes
The main advantage is that the whole thing can be made/bought for $50.00 and is no big loss if it is destroyed/lost.