This is a photo of me holding a ready-to-launch EasyStar model airplane. The plane is fully loaded with camera gear and has a total weight of 1.3kg.
On March 21, 2012 my brother and I flew our model EasyStar airplane over Privateers Island in West Dover, Nova Scotia. The plane carried a Canon PowerShot SD780IS digital camera, a Garmin eTrex Legend GPS, and a wireless video camera.
We launched several flights that day starting around 11am in the morning. This is the first year that I can remember wearing a t-shirt and getting a sunburn in March!
During the vertical aerial photo flight we took several hundred photos. The main thing we noticed when we reviewed the aerial photos of Privateers Island was evidence of significant hurricane damage in the forest. There are large areas in the forest canopy that are now open clearings with a lot of fallen trees.
A vertical aerial photo of the launch site.
The hurricane damage is really visible on the southern part of Privateers Island.
Continue reading 'An Aerial Tour of Privateers Island'»
The Last Sunset of Winter
Here is an HDR image I captured on March 19, 2012 of the last sunset of winter in West Dover, Nova Scotia, Canada. I shot the image handheld using CHDK on my Canon Powershot SD780IS camera and created the HDR in Photoshop.
The weather has been much warmer this March than I have ever experienced. Some years we still have a foot of snow on the ground and ice on the lakes!
Here is a 1km long aerial mosaic image of Poly Cove in West Dover, Nova Scotia.
This morning I created a large aerial mosaic image of Polly Cove, West Dover, Nova Scotia. The mosaic image was stitched in Microsoft ICE from 25 aerial photos taken on Feb 14, 2012. The mosaic image covers a 1 km distance from Highway 333 to the islands off Polly Cove.
The photos were shot with an EasyStar Model airplane using a Canon PowerShot SD780IS camera and CHDK. I used the CHDK countdown intervalometer script to trigger the photos every 2 seconds with a 1/1500 sec shutter speed override.
I started in Microsoft ICE by creating a few smaller mosaic images using the Planar Motion 1 stitch mode and then merged the smaller mosaic's together in a final stitching pass. The full resolution version of the mosaic was 22,114 x 10,549 pixels (233 megapixels).
You can download a scaled down 3.5 megabyte 8Kx4K version of the mosaic image here: super_polly_cove_mosaic.jpg (Right click on the link and select Save Link As...)
Here is a stitched mosaic in Microsoft ICE from 9 photos.
The easiest way to stitch the big aerial photo mosaic was by merging together 7 smaller mosaics.
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