Recent Posts - Page 16 - Eric Cheng
Eric Cheng

Aerial Photography and Videography Using Drones is now shipping!

Today is October 29, the publication date of my first book, Aerial Photography and Videography Using Drones! Order it today from Peachpit, or wait about a week for it to be in stock at Amazon, where strangely, it has been blessed with the status of “#1 New Release in Web Design.” For not being a book about ...

I can’t believe how easy it is to whip up a website using Squarespace—have been a fan of the service for years. I just put up a website for my new book at aerialphotographybook.com. Check it out! 🙂

Hello, everyone! I’m super excited to announce that my first book, Aerial Photography and Videography Using Drones, is now available for pre-order at Amazon for $26.52. It will also be available as a physical book and/or e-book directly from Peachpit, the publisher, on October 29, 2015, and will ship from Amazon and other retailers in early to mid ...

Colorado 360º Spherical Panorama, Inspire 1 Pro, Zenmuse X5

One morning, Thomas O’Brien and I drove to Little Annie’s Basin outside of Aspen, Colorado, to wait for the sun to come up and illuminate the valley. I flew a DJI Inspire 1 Pro and Zenmuze X5 camera w/Olympus 12mm f/2.0 lens out a bit and shot a 48-image, 360º, spherical panorama, which I processed ...

Brushless gimbals, which are now commonplace for stabilizing video in the air, can also be used on the ground in interesting ways. Photographer Thomas O’Brien took me over Taylor Pass near Aspen, Colorado, today in his highly-modified Toyota Tacoma, and we had some fun by attaching a gimbal-stabilized GoPro to various areas of the car. ...

As a California boy, I have really never seen proper fall colors (I’m told we don’t have seasons). Last week, I decided that I should probably see fall colors at some point, so now I’m in Aspen shooting fall colors from both land and air. I’ve always loved the top-down perspective from low altitudes because they ...

Time slice (bullet time) processing into 3D models

As you can probably tell, I’ve been obsessed with aerial 3D modeling lately. I finally saw Inferno, the short time slice / bullet time video, and thought it was pretty amazing. [vimeo 132024990 w=540 h=304] After seeing the video, I thought it might be fun to run the frames through Pix4DMapper to see whether a ...

Behold, the Air Hogs Star Wars Remote Control Ultimate Millenium Falcon Quad! Walmart is selling it online for $88.84, and Amazon currently has it starting at $120. That is $20 for a cheap foam quadcopter, and between $68.84 and $100 for the Star Wars branding. What an amazing franchise!

We are having our pool filled in this week, so I went out with the DJI Inspire 1 and preproduction Zenmuse X5 camera and made an aerial 3D map of our house (processed using both Pix4DMapper Pro and DroneDeploy’s new—and free—Map Engine beta).  I decided that I wanted to measure the volume of the empty pool ...