Tag: drones - Page 5 - Eric Cheng
Eric Cheng

Tag: drones

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 ...

I tried to take a spherical panorama inside 16th Street Station in Oakland, today. The prototype DJI Inspire 1 w/Zenmuse X5′s Visual Positioning System wasn’t working, so I had to pilot manually the whole time in ATTI, which was challenging for aerial panorama movements.  There were a couple major issues with my attemps: 1) I ...

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KzA5ZWKlr0?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141] I spent part of the day hanging out at 16th Street Station in Oakland with a few mapping people from Autodesk, 3DR, Leica, and others, and it was a great opportunity to capture some mapping source data using a DJI Inspire 1 and prototype DJI Zenmuse X5 Micro Four Thirds camera.  In typical fashion, ...