Category Archives: Photography

Drones helped track & stop the Notre Dame fire

Photography

Even without purpose-made mods like available thermal cameras, DJI drones helped minimize damage to Notre Dame. According to The Verge,

Fire brigade spokesman Gabriel Plus told local media that the drones were instrumental in saving the cathedral’s structure. “The drones allowed us to correctly use what we had at our disposal,” Plus said in comments translated from French. Firefighters also relied on the Mavic Pro’s visible light camera and optical and electronic zoom… 

“The mission was delicate and they intelligently called for the Parisian Police Drone Unit cell, which is a dedicated team of professional drone pilots ready to intervene in critical missions,” the spokesperson added. The drones were borrowed from France’s culture and interior ministries, as firefighters still don’t have their own drones.

Deliriously awesome drone + drifting

Photography

Amazing flying, shooting, and drifting on what appear to be the roads above Silicon Valley:

See also this short racetrack clip. Seems that the footage comes courtesy of one of these little goblins:

[YouTube]

Check out my drone shot making the grade

Photography

…or at least getting the grade, courtesy of Stewart Carroll of the oft-linked Drone Film Guide. A few weeks back he solicited viewer contributions of content we’d like to see expertly adjusted. And voila, check out the clip below! (My wife didn’t even complain that he’s using FCP. 😌) 

Maybe this will finally, six+ months later, get my motivated to finally grade & post footage from that awesome beach in Cabo. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

NewImage

[YouTube]

Long-exposure drone photography

Photography

Living in often bone-dry California, I can’t say that I’d thought of trying to capture waterfalls from a drone, but it’s a neat idea that Stewart Carroll covers nicely in this short overview. Meanwhile I’d like to learn more about paring a slow shutter with device motion to freeze a subject (e.g. a moving train) while blurring the background.

[YouTube]

Photography: Red carpet robot @ 1,000fps

Photography

I’m intrigued by the Glambot:

The Glambot itself is well-known Bolt high-speed cinebot by Camera Control holding up a Phantom 4K Flex camera with a Leica Summilux lens mounted on it. […]

“The pressure is on because you only ever have ONE take, and this is a dangerous rig that can knock you out,” Walliser writes. “I get good at explaining things, but sometimes the environment is so frenetic you can’t really hear me or focus.”

Check it out in action:

[YouTube]

A peek at Oppo’s new 10x optical zoom for phones

Photography

Looks pretty nifty, though it’s interesting that it doesn’t (at least currently) work for capturing video or macro shots:

The Verge explains,

The key component to Oppo’s system is a periscope setup inside the phone: light comes in through one lens, gets reflected by a mirror into an array of additional lenses, and then arrives at the image sensor, which sits perpendicular to the body of the phone. That’s responsible for the telephoto lens in Oppo’s array, which has a 35mm equivalence of 160mm. Between that lens, a regular wide-angle lens, and a superwide-angle that’s 16mm-equivalent, you get the full 10x range that Oppo promises.

[YouTube]

Photography: Beautiful orbital shots of “The World Below”

Photography

Bruce Berry (not Neil Young’s late roadie) created some beautiful time lapse imagery from images captured aboard the International Space Station:

On Vimeo he writes,

All footage has been edited, color graded, denoised, deflickered, stabilized by myself. Some of the 4K video clips were shot at 24frames/sec reflecting the actual speed of the space station over the earth. Shots taken at wider angels were speed up a bit to match the flow of the video.

Some interesting facts about the ISS: The ISS maintains an orbit above the earth with an altitude of between 330 and 435 km (205 and 270 miles). The ISS completes 15.54 orbits per day around the earth and travels at a speed of 27,600 km/h; 17,100 mph).

The yellow line that you see over the earth is Airgolw/Nightglow. Airglow/Nightglow is a layer of nighttime light emissions caused by chemical reactions high in Earth’s atmosphere. A variety of reactions involving oxygen, sodium, ozone, and nitrogen result in the production of a very faint amount of light (Keck A and Miller S et al. 2013).

I love the choice of music & wondered whether it comes from Dunkirk. Close: that somewhat anxious tock-tock undertone is indeed a Hans Zimmer jam, but from 20 years earlier (The Thin Red Line).

[YouTube]