I’ve looked into doing aerial photography with a helium balloon and a solar balloon, but there are major disadvantages that I just can’t overcome. Helium is just too expensive for the gas itself and solar balloons need to be much larger to support a certain weight. Also, solar balloons wouldn’t work well since it’s been 100 degrees outside recently. With that looked in to, another, lesser altitude option is to use a pole device to lift the camera up high.
In just ten minutes and no real fore-thought, I was able attach my iPhone to a clamp, put the clamp on the end of two small PVC pipes attached to one another and raise it up to approximately 15 feet off the ground. I had no plan of what I was shooting, I just made a circle while my iPhone snapped photos every 5 seconds. This simple experiment taught me a few things that I hope you can learn from as well….
- The iPhone app I used, “FXF by JOBY” allowed time-lapse, but the photo size was shrunk down and not really usable. Instead, go with a time-lapse app that can export higher resolution photos like, “Gorillacam“.
- I used 1″ PVC pipe with a joint in the middle. The joint enabled the tubing to sway in a circular motion; which was probably the cause of most of the photos coming out blurry. A more sturdy pole would be less worrisome and give clearer results.
- I used a simple clamp to hold the iPhone and the handle of the clamp was just placed inside the PVC pipe. Nothing by gravity prevented the clamp from coming out of the pipe. This would need to be worked on so that it is more secure and yet easy to put the iPhone in/out of a ‘clamping mechanism’
Helium Notes:
