I Got Bitten By The Heli Aerial Photography Bugs After Doing This:

( Link to my 1st attempt CLICK HERE )

After I tryed out that set up, I could only get video. All pictures I tried to take were so blurry. Must be something wrong with the set up I thought. I got some helps & offers from Askman to try out his New Gimbal System. So I was one of the first guys who has an opportunity to test and try out his system. I've been working with it for the last 3 days.

Thursday night last week, after getting home from work, my wife showed me a "funny" looking landing gear system. She said it was cute. It came completely assembled. It's landing gear plus gimbal system. It's CNC'ed from thick yellow G10. Looks very strong.

I took some pictures of it. Here is one:


The camera swings freely in aileron & fore/aft direction. It comes with some vibration dampen system built in. Camera angle can be adjusted up & down in the fore/aft direction.

The camera mount is designed so that any camera with 4.25 x 2.5 square inches can fit and be securely mounted.

It was designed for the Trex helicopter, but I managed to mount my heli (ARK / Trex hybrid Heli) on top of that landing gear & gimbal system in about 15minutes (including removing my old music wire landing gear)

Wanna see it?

and


I tried to see if my Heli can lift the whole setup including the Nikon Coolpix 3700 (popular choice for doing aerial photography). So at 3:30am in the morning, I brought it out to the front yard and hovered. Yes, it lifted off and was so stable. I was so happy.

It weights around 120grams according to Askman (I did not have a chance to weight it). Minus the stock landing gear of the Heli, the increased weight is probably 100 grams. Not bad. The camera including battery and memory card weights 170grams so the total flying weight of this system is around 270grams. My Heli uses a MaxAmp 2100 3S with a Neu 1105/3 motor. It was flying with a 305mm wooden blade. Later I also tried out 335mm wooden blades and the 325mm fiber glass blades.

Having the urge to try it out, I brought it to work the next day. It came to my notice that the wind was so windy. I set the camera in timer interval shooting. It took picture every 30 seconds. Not fast enough to have many pictures I want. I did not have time to work on the remote trigger and my heli was using Electron 6 so remote trigger was out of option. Okay, a system to take picture would not benefit if it can't take picture So how the pictures look like? Okay, here they are:

Not good you may say. But it was because of the strong wind and because the lighting wasn't good at the time. It was around 6:30pm. The camera picked the shutter speed at 1/180seconds. Not a good shutter speed to take pictures even when you are in a moving car. But it was pretty impressive that lots of vibration and heli with no co pilot or gyro to stablize and up about 100 feet in the sky. Another picture, with the same set up, same date & time, the camera auto exposure system chose 1/378 seconds. This time, picture looked much better:

Next day, I went out again, pretty late this time again . At around 6:00pm. It looks better this time, probably due to better lighting and not much wind.


Another next day (Sunday) I went out again at 2:00pm.

Shutter speed was at 1/325 seconds. I prefer 1/500 for any moving set up for my normal shotting with a DSLR camera system, but this tiny point and shoot camera does not have any option for me to do so. I'm pretty happy with the result now Perfect, right? Okay, You may ask how the feelings are when flying with the "geraph" landing gear and camera dangling beneath the heli. Well, I can say that it's definitely not designed for fast forward flying. I was able to do some fast forward flying. At some point I was feeling not enough power to pull the heli back from trees or lamp post. The battery life is shorter but I don't have any measurement now. It does have the ability to FF



How strong is it? Well it's pretty strong. I got a hard landing during ESC cutting off because of low voltage (I saw the alarm going off, but the new pack was pretty flat and cutting off so early, and because of the extra weight, the battery drops sooner than I can land.) It was a hard laning, camera swings around realy hard. No damage. Phew! (last time when I was flying my Samsung camera with the Shadow 3, I got a crash, battery, camera, blades, memory card, flew off every where). This gimbal system and its frame structure do help to protect the camera unless you crash into something not flat One problem with this landing gear is that grass likes it . Grass was holding several of my taking off attempts. It was okay as the heli was strong enough to lift but it's kind of dangerous. Askman gonna fix it I believe. He will also send me a new camera mount designed to further reduced the vibration. I'm pretty happy with it now, especially there is no complicated gyro or copilot involved to stablizing the system. I was just hover with the sticks manually. With this system, everyone who has interests in Aerial photography can use it, and it will make your life much easier Well, sorry for the long post and thanks for your time reading it. Hope you are not too bored. Askman, you did a great job. Thanks very much for giving me this opportunity to try this out.

First attempt to work on AP.

Camera taking off.

Mounting:


A Low Res Video:

( Click Here: For Low Res Video. )

A High Res Video of the same footage:
( Click Here: For High Res Video. )

I've not worked on the trigger mechanism yet. Have not got a 7 CH RX  I will use my new light kit with landing light to trigger the camera. (same as trigger the landing light)

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