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Re: Re:Re: [OM] Aerial Photography

Subject: Re: Re:Re: [OM] Aerial Photography
From: Paul Wallich <pw@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 22:40:42 -0400
At 1:59 PM -0700 8/15/99, "W. J. Liles" <wliles@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Thanks to all for such wonderful suggestions, somehow I knew I could
>count on you.  Ways to keep from falling out of the airplane certainly
>are practical.  However, I actually was sorta hopeing someone would have
>at least teeny bit of advice on what films to use, is infrared film
>helpful to show foliage differences, what lenses are best to use (the
>airplane does vibrate), time of day to show best detail, etc.  I have
>some ideas but no experience.

I've done some vaguely similar stuff (pix hanging out of a crane bucket,
a very little underwater and high ladder work) and would strongly advise
building a mount with a bunch of shock-absorption for the camera and winder,
and calibrating some kind of non-reflex viewfinder/aimpoint indicator. If
you're going to do stuff that gets analysed later, you need to know fairly
precisely what angle the camera is pointing at etc. You also may not want
to auto-expose because that, too, will make later interpretation difficult.

If you have a passenger who can fit in along with the mount, they can record
exposure data etc, but otherwise I would strongly consider setting up the
OM so that it is essentially point-and-shoot (or not even point, since the
airplane can do that. In my limited (but sometimes scary) experience, operating
a camera off stable ground is a fulltime job, and I understand that flying
a plane is the same.

(IR film is supposed to show the difference between vegetation and other
stuff better than regular film, but it will probably require either a
remote-sensing pro or a bunch of test runs to get clear on it.) I think
this _really_ underscores the line that my photojournalism prof pounded
into our heads: don't worry about wasting film -- no matter how much you
shoot, the film is the cheapest part of the shoot.

paul   who thinks this is really cool

PS When you're thinking about lenses (preferably wide, but more preferably
distortion-free) and vibration, remember that the only part of the vibration
that hurts you is the part that causes pointing error. Movement of the camera
that's not rotation around the film plane is irrelevant for pictures at
infinity.

Paul Wallich                                            pw@xxxxxxxxx



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