Aerial Photography. Not as easy as it looks!

[Happy Days]

Today Big Keith & myself ventured into the world of aerial photography. (Using gliders of course! )

The winds on the west slope of Big L were gentle for a good part of the time we were there. Keith flew his Zagi, and me? Well I flew my P6 of course!

I used a piece of EPS cut to a wedge shape and positioned it on the nose of the model. This made the little fob camera point downwards, so as to view the ground. I used tape to hold the ‘assembly’ in place although I’ve removed the tape in this picture so you can see how the camera was positioned.



We made a couple of flights each. The idea being that one plane would ‘shoot’ the other in flight. It proved to be a lot harder that I first thought.

For my first flight I set the camera to take one still photo every 2 seconds. The results, as I’ve just suggested, were not terribly encouraging.
Out of 423 individual pictures taken during the flight only 3 showed anything other than open countryside.

For my second flight I set the camera to video mode. The results were not much better.

As with the first flight, on playback I found that most of the video was of open countryside, which, with the rolling and pitching of the plane, made for almost nauseous viewing. The viewing experience isn’t so bad while the horizon is horizontal. But with the rolling of even gentle turns the viewing experience become quite uncomfortable.
The raw footage ran for some 8m 45s.

I’ve linked both the usable photos and usable footage together. Here is the link to the vid. (I don't know how to embed videos :oops:  )

https://vimeo.com/68304137

 Tell me what you think guys. Be honest please.

Keith (Little)

[Keith]

Hi keith
The few bits used looked good and it was good craic filming it
 
The footage from the zagi was to shaky to use..  the p6 was more stable ..

[selleri]

Have a part of the plane filming in view, it helps keeping the motion sickness at bay.

[Happy Days]

Hey Selleri,
that’s a good idea of using part of the airframe as a visual fixed reference!  I’ve seen that on other videos, but I just assumed the airframe was in shot by accident.

Today I’m off to try the same idea of filming models in flight from a flying camera at my local powered flying club. I’ve found it’s very difficult to get two models flying accurately relative to each other at any sort of distance away from the pilots. So I’ll be using a runway as a flight reference for both the camera and target plane.

I had a little bit of success with this the other day while the camera was pointing straight down out of a ‘bomb bay hatch’ of the camera plane. On that occasion the model being filmed was a rather expensive F3A so the camera plane was kept very much higher for fear of collision between the two models. Alas this meant that on playback  the target plane looked very small.
Today the film star will be a cheap fomie and I’m hoping to get rather more in the way of close up shots.

Right now there is very little wind and the sun is shinning out of a blue sky. (It does that in Ireland sometimes you know!) Watch this space for the results ……………

K.

[selleri]

Then you can have some other interesting artifacts!    :?:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/LU9mviLFt3c[/youtube]

[Happy Days]

Ha! :lol:

 I’d say you’ve got a little bit of electromagnetic interferometry occurring there. Very psychedelic!  :lol:

You're such a cool dude Selleri

K.

[Fred]

That video wants me to listen to "Sweet Smoke"  :lol:  :lol:
Or an Early Pink Floyd  :wink:

Anyways Keiths, good attempt  :clap:
But careful now with aerial videos, in my opinion, they are only interesting for the ones who flew the plane if you see what I mean  :?: .
Need to be kept short, or with other shots in the video to complement them  

So, did you flew at the field?

[Happy Days]

Ha! Thanks for your comments Fred.

I absolutely agree with you about aerial videos, 99% of them are, to put it bluntly…..boring viewing.

But imagine a video of  (say) a fly in.  Okay, a glide in then!  Lots of shots of pilots and thier girlfriends (   )....(or wives for the conventional among us) along with the odd shot of a model plane or two. In such a video there would likely be some shots of launching and flying models, but only from the perspective of a static camera on the ground.
Suppose the shots of the flying models were interspersed with shots (of the same model)  taken from a ‘flying camera’ alongside or above. I think that would be a lot more interesting. Of course it means a lot of work just to get a few unusual shots on screen, or else ‘throw money’ at the problem and buy an all singing all dancing copter with remote control fully gimballed HD camera with live feed back. (But that’s not really solving the problem is it, it’s just overwhelming it.)

Went out to the Flying Ground with Brian yesterday. We tried our best but I have to say the results were rather disappointing. The problem, as much as anything else, seemed to be that the two different planes flew differently. (Did I ever tell you I have a degree from the university of the Bleeding Obvious. )
Flying both planes into wind, up the runway took both pilots (Brian & me) a few moment to catch up with each other so to speak. By the time the target plane was in shot of the camera plane both planes had flown past us and were flying out across open fields,…….getting smaller and less able for us to gauge their distance and position relative to each other.
The net results were just a few images for the target plane ’passing through’ the shots on screen.
Now we’ve both gained a bit of experience we’re going to try it again some time next week. I’ll wait till then and put all the shots together and show you how we got on.

K.