Airborne Imaging
Keeping up in today’s fast-paced field of photography and video is challenging; technology is just taking off. The up side? Photographs once impossible or at least extremely expensive to shoot are now yours for the taking.
deer feeding among the remaining mortuary and memorial totem poles on the site. Our guides provided fascinating insight to the history and culture of the islands and the Haida people. This dive trip was unlike any other. At Rose Harbour we explored a
long abandoned whaling station. Nearby, on a few scattered parcels of privately owned land, hardy homesteaders still live and thrive. On the beach you can see some rusting bone digester tanks and there’s a disintegrating furnace building too. Off this west coast of Haida Gwaii the ocean bottom angles deeply into the sea, providing little or no continental shelf. Upwellings of cold, nutrient rich water here have
long attracted whale populations that were decimated by the global whaling industry before the Government of Canada put a stop to the practice in its territorial waters. Nearly 40 years later whales
are making a comeback. The day after our visit to the whaling station we were thrilled to see humpback whales cavorting nearby as the Nautilus Swell steamed slowly northwards through windy Hecate Strait. Even Sperm Whales have been sighted from time to time off the west coast of the island and perhaps most exciting of all was news reported only weeks after our visit of the fi rst confi rmed sighting of a Pacifi c Right Whale in British Columbia. It was the fi rst seen in over 60 years!
Gwaii Haanas National Park
Reserve is a vast protected area of land and ocean and plenty of
reefs to explore
Looking at my Haida Gwaii portfolio a number of people have asked how I got the cool aerial photos of the Nautilus Swell at anchor? The answer is with the latest addition to my camera arsenal, a small DJI Phantom quadcopter carrying a GoPro Hero camera mounted on a motorized camera gimbal/anti-vibration assembly. With this rig I can shoot aerial photographs and silky smooth aerial HD video wherever I travel. The camera is preset for stills shot on a timer, or for video, though the camera can be adjusted remotely to shoot vertically or at other angles. Powered by a lithium polymer (LiPo) battery this rig with all its components can stay aloft for about seven minutes. The quadcopter, gimbal rig and camera add up to about $1,500. If you want a Field of View (FOV) transmitter to see what you’re shooting, the price goes up to about $2,000. But this puppy can fly where a full size helicopter could never go! And it’s quiet. Multicopters or remotely controlled aerial drones are common now. Larger models can lift full size movie production cameras. They’re deceptively easy to fly, which makes them deceptively easy to crash. I’ve done this many times over 200 plus hours of ‘pilot’ training. Flying over the ocean risks losing it all to get the shot. And if you think insurance for underwater photography equipment is hard to get, try explaining that scenario to your insurance guy! For more aerial imagery visit:
www.DaleSanders.info
www.divermag.com 35
Photo: Dale Sanders
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