Daily picture

[Xcellgasman101]

Nice shot Mark,, I need to make a watermark, for my photo's too,, I got to talk to the general contractor today, with Lakeshore Eng. and he said that he was going to write us a letter of comadation to the head man with the company, and That he was going to hire us from now on, on all his projects.. Sounds really good, but I have heard that story before,, We'll see what happens.. XGM

[ddierking]

Did some practicing at the park today.

[ddierking]

Practicing on my buddy's log cabin.

[MLaBoyteaux]

Here's one from last weekend. My associate Mike Edwards (birdseye) did the post production in Photoshop. I like it!

[dreslism]

Originally Posted by MLaBoyteaux

Another pool image....

I got behind on these and just realized there were some more posts.

Real nice shot Mark.

Any idea what a setup like that goes for?

[dreslism]

Originally Posted by MLaBoyteaux

Here's one from last weekend. My associate Mike Edwards (birdseye) did the post production in Photoshop. I like it!

Yeah that is nice.

Do you know what focal length this was shot at?

[birdseye]

Do you know what focal length this was shot at?[/quote]

We had the lens dialed in to approx. 20mm, so with a 1.6x sensor magnification it works out to 32mm in 35mm film lens equivalent. I think this is a good length. It's wide enough to get your shots without having to be too far away, yet it doesn't create the image distortion you get with a shorter lens. The above image had no distortion correction applied!

This stuff is just FUN!
Mike

[MLaBoyteaux]

I'm not sure, that was the General Manager's personal pool.

I've started working with another pilot who is getting started in AP. He goes by birdseye here on the forum. He's a great pilot AND he's an experienced photographer. We've decided to try working together to see how it goes. So far, it's great, he has a good eye for composition and he's good with Photoshop. I've always just set the lens on my Rebel to 17mm (28mm effective). He wanted to try some narrower settings so we experimented with 25mm which seemed a little too narrow, so we settled on 22mm (35mm), which is what we used for this image.

It helps reduce the amount of distortion, especially when the horizon is in the upper third of the image. The downside is I had to fly a little higher and farther back than usual. I think I may go ahead and rig up a zoom control so he can tweak the focal length from the ground for each shot.

I would estimate I was probably close to 300' high when we shot that one. There's no way I would be comfortable going this high with the electric raptor, even with the AP-2000. I'm 43 and I went in for a full blown eye exam on Monday. My far vision is excellent, but it may be time to give in for a set of reading glasses for occasional use.

[MLaBoyteaux]

Hah, too funny. We both posted at the same time!

[LoopBaCK]

I got back into using eyetops with my electric Swift (smaller than Raptor) and it helps tremendously when going higher than 200'. I'm not flying 1st person, mind you, just using my direct ground-based visual and the downlink together to go higher, maintain orientation and get the shot. I routinely fly the Swift as high as 400' with no issue as far as orientation. I must say, however, there is no way I could take that small of a heli up that high without an AP2000i onboard.

300' - 400' with a small heli is a lot more tense then with a big gasser!

[LoopBaCK]

Originally Posted by MLaBoyteaux

Here's one from last weekend. My associate Mike Edwards (birdseye) did the post production in Photoshop. I like it!

That's a great shot Mark/Mike!!! I really love the way clouds can dance the sunlight around. It's all in timing to get the light in the right locations but when you do it looks awsome!

Good job guys! :glasses2:

[enigma]

Here's todays shoot. The front had lighting issues, I tried late yesterday but the buyers cars were in the drive so I had to go back this morning and deal with the sun.

[birdseye]

Nice shots Enigma, what a beautiful house! The second shot is not unusable by any means though. I hope you don't mind, but I spent 2 minutes in CS2 on your 2nd pic, used Shadow/Highlight tool to bring out some detail in the shadow area. Photoshop is an amazingly powerful tool.

Looking good!

Mike

[enigma]

No matter what we did, the picture looks bad! we ended up using this one. I really need to invest in Photoshop soon. The client was tickled, especially with the back shot, and has comitted to every loan they make getting this.

[MLaBoyteaux]

That image looks like it turned out pretty good!

[dreslism]

Yeah Enigma, sounds like you made some repeat business.

Whenever I have a High contrast photo, I try some contrast masking. Takes about 20 seconds to try it out. Pulls out the content of the shadows, tames down the hot spots, and helps remove the haze from the sun.

Literally takes 20 seconds once you know the keystrokes.

Try it on a high contrast photo.

CTRL J (duplicate layer)
CTRL SHIFT U (remove color)
CTRL I (Invert layer)
On layers pallete now change mode from Normal to Overlay.
On the filters tab up top, choose blur, Gaussian blur, then play with the slider, somewhere between 20-60.

[lakespinner2]

Thanks Scott ! That's a pretty cool set of commands. I was just playing around with it and noticed it can really make the puffy clouds (and heli smoke) 'pop' too. TYVVM

[enigma]

anyone know if the gimp uses the same or similiar commands?

[dreslism]

Finally had some decent weather today.

Some of the first shots from my new rebel.

Gotta go update my ap2000i with the new firmware!

[MLaBoyteaux]

Sweet pics, Scott! I wish we had fall colors here. It goes from Summer straight to winter. It was 94 today. I really like the images from the Rebel, wish we had a 5D or something, but the Rebel does a great job.

Put the downlink, gimbal receiver, and power supply for them on the Raptor today. With the Rebel, all up ready to fly, 14lb 8 ounces

Hovered it for a minute in the driveway under the street lamps and it's still only pulling about 19 amps to hover. Shot some speculative shots on Sunday after spending all day Saturday hanging out with LoopBack at the airshow and talking AP. One realtor bought the shots from Sunday and contracted for me to do 2 more properties tomorrow! Yeeeee-Haaaaaa!