Perspective Aerials UAV

Canon 5D Mark II Aerial Drone - Autonomous GPS Position Hold from perspectiveAerials on Vimeo.

I think I badly need one of these. Not just because it would be a new "toy." One of the real challenges on assignment is getting an aircraft into place to shoot aerials of remote locations. Just the aircraft positioning fees (if there is an airplane to be had at all) can be thousands of dollars. Not to mention the headache of permits...

On the Madagascar Stone Forest story I had to make and arduous  2 day journey out of base camp to meet a cesna that I had pre arranged to have fly down from the capitol to a remote airstrip -there was no helicopter available. Then I was limited to shooting until the plane had just enough fuel to get back to the capitol. The aerials are good (below) but they are shot at 100 miles an hour from as low as the pilot dared to fly.

 

A UAV would have allowed me to get the camera much lower and go much slower. The pictures, I imagine, would be much more intimate. Imagine flying a camera by a group of lemurs or climbers on the pinnacles? This device could open up whole new worlds.

 

Stephen Alvarez

Sewanee, TN

Comments

[Stephen Alvarez]

@ Stirling
I am looking into this pretty seriously and it looks like you can put together an 8 rotor version for about 5 grand, however like many things I think you have to be pretty dedicated to learning how to fly and maintain it.

[twitter.com/sterlingz]

This is amazing Stephen - I must have one!

I couldn't agree more - I was just out photographing the Whale Shark aggregation off of the Yucutan, and this would have been invaluable. We chartered a helicopter, but the first day there was a misunderstanding with the pilot about the coordinates, and we ended up having to buy another day of flight time. Very expensive. It was also a small aircraft which limited the ability to hover with three passengers, so like you we were traveling a bit fast to capture the scene properly. Also, by the time we arranged the the flight, the aggregation had dwindled to around 50 sharks. If we had been able to deploy this when the aggregation was at its peak of around 300 animals, it would have been just phenomenal.

Now we just need one of these that can support a payload heavy enough to accommodate a gyro for super stable video!!

Wonderful aerial images of the Tsingy - glad to see them.

[Framelessframes.blogspot.com]

Happy photographers day Stephen.