Last updated: June, 2006

Aerial Photography – a cheap way to get into it

written by Ian.

I always wanted to take pictures from on board my aeroplanes – there’s something very satisfying about seeing what it looks like from the “aeroplanes view”. My earliest attempts involved using a disposable camera (just in case I crashed) looking along the length of the wing on a trainer plane. This meant however that I had to land between each picture and wind on the camera. I had reasonable results but unfortunately the plane was destroyed after a linkage failure.

Several years later I had built a Magnatilla for my son Stuart and he had temporarily lost interest so I thought about trying again with a cheap digital camera. I noticed while shopping one day that there was a perfect candidate for the job – a palm size digital camera at only £9.99 from a card shop. The price was dropped for the New Year sale. They were quite rare then but you see lots of them now.

The next job was to build a frame to hold the camera and servo. This was made with liteply, lined with foam tape for vibration reduction and a couple of elastic bands for holding the camera in place. The servo was an old Hitec mini servo. I shaped the servo disc to a cam shape so that it operated the shutter button on the flick of a switch at the transmitter. A similar problem to the wind on with the disposable arose – the cheap digital camera had a 30 second power save feature which can’t be changed. This meant that I needed to count 30 seconds or less between each operation of the shutter which inevitably meant getting some shots of blue sky. Results however, were reasonable – as example opposite,. the aerial shot of our flying field.

My latest venture is the CVS camcorder. It costs around £30 + carriage if you can find one. This is a disposable camcorder from the States that has been converted to be multi – use…. Now things are getting easier – all that’s needed is a similar mount built from liteply and foam tape. Simply switch on the camera while it is aboard the plane, press record, and you get 20 minutes of camcorder footage. First results are good – especially the rolls and loops. The next thing to try will be shots looking back towards the fin and then I’ll try some helicopter footage. If the file isn’t too big Stuart will maybe post one of the films on this website.

Best of luck to any of you that have a go – it’s very rewarding to see what it looks like from up there after all these years of flying.

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