Originally posted by photoptimist Cool science project! A few more thoughts and ideas....:
1. Have you looked at the drone's APIs and on-board control features? If it has any digital I/O features, you may be able to control the K-1 from the ground through the drone's API with a simple bit of electronics, and the wired remote port on the camera. And if that doesn't work, then a long-range wireless remote control can do that job.
2. Time lapse could work if you program the drone to fly to a grid of locations at set time intervals and hover in sync with camera's time lapse. (Note: you are probably going to want to program the drone to fly a fixed grid for the survey and sensor shots anyway so that your scans are comparable over time.)
3. Wifi range will be curtailed and unreliable if there is any vegetation between the drone and the base station.
4. AF may not work well in UV or IR. But manual focus should be workable for your project even at f/1.4. For example, if your goal is to image a 10 m x 15 m rectangle with each shot (= a pixel size of 2mm on the ground), you'll be flying at about 20.8 m above ground level. If you set a 50 mm f/1.4 lens to focus at 16 m, then everything from ground level up to about 10 m up should be in focus. You can use a DoF calculator (
Depth of Field (DoF) calculator | PhotoPills) for other scenarios.
5. You'll probably want to do some experimentation with lenses to check the plane of focus, aberrations, and transmission in UV and IR.
I look forward to hearing more about your project!
Thanks for the input, much appreciated!
1. I have thought of something like that, i.e. a gentle hack :-) However, let's first see what the reply and subsequent correspondence with Pentax Surveying reveals about the UP-1!
2. Yes, we are planning to use pre-programmed flight plan for the most part. It also removes any operator delay, thus saving precious flight time. A battery pack costs around 700 euros so we can't just buy ten of them :-D We'll likely get three sets as that should give a pretty good work flow (apparently takes about 90min to charge).
3. This is true. However, one of the two locations is a rather open fen with no tree canopy to obstruct. The other one is a dry pine forest but not overly dense so we'll see.
4. That's exactly what I had in mind: to use the DoF calculator for each lens being used. I also thought that at the heights we're going to use, depth of focus should be pretty good. So thanks for verifying! Depending on what legacy lenses we end up buying, we will likely use a 35mm f3.5 and a 50mm f2.8 or f4.0 for the UV shoots and Pentax new DFA 50mm f1.4 for visible light and IR scans. Yes, you are right: no AF with the UV work.
5. Most definitely! I have already started by diving into a few oases of information on UV:
35 mm lenses for UV Ultraviolet Photography
Both sites contain a wealth of information and links!
I will definitely keep updating this thread as we progress :-) It will take months just to make the choices, purchase equipment and assemble it. But hopefully some time in the summer we will start the actual work!