UAV Photography

The magic of a bird's flight is truly amazing and awe inspiring, their bird eye view of the world from above is similar to that of our UAV live stream video and UAV Photography. It is made possible by the design of the bird's wings, feathers, the skeleton structure and their desire to fly. The flight technique of a bird may be gliding, soaring, flapping its wings while being stationery, braking or taking off from the land or water. The most majestic large birds of the sky may be: Golden Eagles (wingspan 2.5 meters), Grey Crowned Crane (2.5 meter wing span), California condor (2.8 meters), or the Wandering Albatross (3.6 meter wing span). It is truly awesome experience to encounter such a majestic bird in the wild, at relatively close distance.

I think that the greatest design inspiration and most reverse engineering study done from natural designs has been from the flight of birds and their natural technique to fly, their feather covered wing designs. After all they do it so efficiently with grace, with such a small amounts of energy needed making use of the available air currents and updraft. Their feather wing designs are light, body fat is low, and their bones are hollow.
UAV photography captures some of that freedom that birds experience, it is a three dimensional freedom to move on land, on water and thorough the air. The new innovative technology is more affordable for hobbyist to practice UAV photography; it is much more energy efficient that real planes or real size helicopters. What is most exciting is that a live digital video camera can be attached to the UAV drone that can be controlled from the ground. The camera can be independently controlled and set to a GPS determined direction keeping the camera focused on target despite whether the drone is pitching (tilting), turning, ascending or descending, it creates a smoother stream for video viewing.

Drone with a camera.

Video camera mounted UAV is on the ground ready for takeoff, the motors are running at low revs, the camera is switched on and the video view shows the concrete and the green grass of the cricket pitch. The revs are increased and the audio sound of the rotors and propellers working gets louder, suddenly the Drone takes off the ground and climbs up and up to about 100 feet (30 meters) directly above, as it climbed the video shows an operator of the drone standing near a concrete cricket pitch, and the person and the cricket pitch is getting smaller and smaller as the distance increases. The operator of the drone moves the flight controls to send the drone some 30 feet to the north, the GPS knows where that is and the drone obeys the command of the flight control. It is now located 30 feet north of the position that it launched from, the pilot then sets the flight controls so that the drone will fly in a 60 feet radius around and above the launch site, above the pilot. The camera has a fix on the pilot and it is recording that target as the drone flies around above the cricket field. Without smart technology and GPS system software this would not be possible, this is what makes the UAV Photography so much easier to use and so much better in the video view quality.

What types of UAV designs are there?

There are many, but the most common ones for the hobbyist are three: helicopters, multi propeller helicopters (3-8), gliders with and a propeller engine and single wing designs. In the military type applications there are 45 countries according to Wikipedia that have designed their own version of UAV, from Argentina to Vietnam. The new digital technologies have made it so much more cost efficient to put a camera up in the sky to view what is going on at any time for whatever reason; it may be natural disasters, earthquakes, and drought, flooding or bush fires. Police forces use them equipped with; single image, video and heat sensing cameras, they make searching so much easier in the dark of night. The high performance UAV drones that the police, rescue operations and military use are not available for civilian use, they are very serious UAV drones that can fly long distances at high altitudes remotely controlled via live video streaming and pre programmed GPS flight controls using online Google maps.