Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Mercedes Benzene
Excellent idea Turtle!
That's a very, very good idea.
|
Credit where credit is due, and in this case my Straight-Up Cam idea is an expansion of a suggestion by my housemate Ace. To whit, when I was doing all the bird photography with the camera in a weatherproof enclosure, Ace suggested I set it upright with plexiglass over the lens opening & sprikled with bird seed in order to get close-ups of the undersides of the birds.
Thanks Ace!
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by TheGidBog
Ideally I would do the experiment with two cameras a measured distance apart taking photos in sync with each other. You could then use triangulation to get the altitude of things you see my locating them in the simulantanious frames. Some method of initial calibration would need to be performed.
|
Excellent observation B! I don't have the equipment for that (yet
), but I plan to do some calibration by holding a yardstick in the field of view until it exactly fills the frame side-to-side (then top-to-bottom), then measuring its distance from the focal plane of the lens. This is enough to determine the angle(s) of the cone of field-of-view. A couple of sightings of aircraft of known size overflying at a known altitude & I can have a rough rule of thumb at least.
My multi-camera scheme I mentioned is for viewing/recording clouds in the visual spectrum & uses 4 cameras. Three are at the corners of an equilateral traingle spaced a kilometer or more appart, with the fourth a straight-up-cam in the center of the triangle. The three corner cams are all focused on the same point directly above the straight-up-cam. The signals then need combining via computer software to form a three-dimensional view of the clouds.
So, this brings us up to the current experiment. As the 1 hour tape running at the 2sec/5min interval records about 3 days of activity, I am camping in the living room now at least that long. I have brought in my 13" TV with VCR so I can record 6 hours nonstop of the live feed. I then review the tape in FF (takes about 20 min) for any "hits" before rewinding the tape & re-recording it. The biggest potential problem is catching something good on the VCR but missing it on the camer's digital tape between record intervals; this because I can't put the VCR images onto the computer.
At night, I set the camera to either Nightshot or SuperNightshot infrared mode, where the Super mode keeps the shutter open 4 times as long & results in a brighter but jerky image.
Nothing but blue sky, a lone lingering cumulus cloud, & an over-flying bug to report so far.
