Seen on Kickstarter.com – an iPhone case that lets you mount the phone to a telescope or a microscope for phototaking. That might be pretty useful.
Support the project on Kickstarter here.
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It’s amazing how fast technology changes. Three years ago I was experimenting – rather unsuccessfully – with using radio-controlled helicopters outfitted with cameras to take aerial and elevated photos. I wasn’t successful because of the time investment it took to learn how to fly a copter (a lot harder than it looks!) and the financial investment to spend on equipment – not just a copter, but rigging for the camera, electronics to make the helicopter and camera work in tandem, and of course, spares for the inevitable crashes. Today, you can actually make your own RC helicopter, not just a conventional single-rotor type but a multi-rotor (and hence more stable) platform – see the ArduCopter, named after the Arduino platform from which it is based. No time to delve into hobbyist electronics? You can buy a ready made system for about $1,000 – not cheap, but not prohibitively expensive, either. Perhaps at a later time where I have a little more time to experiment with, I may go back into dabbling with this technology.
I was just thinking about radio-controlled helicopters and mapping because I recently came across this post from the Tanah Datar Archaeological Project running out of Sumatra, Indonesia. They are currently undertaking an archaeological project at the Tanah Datar highlands there, and one of the cool toys the project is playing with is an Octocopter – like the name suggests, eight propellers which suggests super-stability in the air. With a camera mounted and a programmed flight path, the copter can map a specified area using GPS points as waypoints on a route to create aerial surface maps and 3D surface maps. Read about the Octocopter here. Adobe PhotoShop CS6 is now available for public beta testing! You can download a copy through Adobe labs on the link here.
Russell Brown from Adobe has a rundown of six cool features in this new version on this official Adobe video: I’m most excited about features 1, 2 and 6 – The new camera RAW version for processing RAW images, the adaptive wide-angle and the video editing tool. Yes, video editing. PhotoShop is starting to look a lot like Premiere now – but it’s a natural evolution considering how digital cameras also double as functional video cameras these days. This was a presentation I made last year at a workshop on Rock Art Studies in Southeast Asia in Bangkok in 2011. We were meant to present reports about the rock art in our individual countries, but Singapore is really small and so there was a concession for me to present about my research interests. I had a small section about a piece of engraved rock in Singapore, and then talked about 8 broad considerations about using digital photography in rock art research. Rock art research is still relatively new in this region, and so not a lot has been written about it in terms of individual sites or methodologies. Click on the image to see the slides.
Here’s a tip from PetaPixel about putting your contact information in your memory cards so that if they ever get lost (and all the precious data within!) there might still be a chance of getting it back. Read here.
Except… I regularly format my cards as part of my ritual when I set out for a shooting day. Perhaps I should just stick labels onto my cards instead! Infra-red photography is a kind of fringe photography technique using sensor data recording infra-red (or near-infra-red) light instead of visible light to paint a picture. In archaeology, it can be used to draw out faded pigments on parchment and ceramics, or used to highlight landscape features in aerial photography (see here and here). These days, it’s not that easy to shoot infra-red photographs because of the hassle – you could buy an IR lens filter which only lets in IR light, but this means that you’re limited to long exposures and a tripod; newer cameras also have very good IR filters built on top of the sensor apparatus so you’d have to modify your camera (voiding your warranty) and end up with a limited functionality camera. Recently, I picked up this Yashica “Night-Vision’ camera at my local camera store a month ago. At about US$80, it was small and costs less than the price of modifying a camera so I decided to give it a try.
I’ve noticed an increasing trend for using digital cameras as video cameras as well – particularly with DSLRS because besides shooting in HD, they have the advantage of using different lenses and the types of perspective that come with it. I’m hoping to experiment with some videography as another way to record sites this year, and not wanting to shell out a couple of hundred dollars for a rig, decided to make one around my monopod using PVC pipes.
Here’s a simple DIY fieldwork hack I came up with for holding up scales during rock art work. Like all archaeological material, we photograph rock art with a scale in view – the standard being the IFRAO (International Federation of Rock Art Organisations) Standard scale. Of course, rock art isn’t always located at eye-level or within easy reach, so I made up a telescopic scale holder using a tv antenna.
In the last post I talked about apps I use for archaeological fieldwork. In this post I run down the apps in my iPhone/iPad that I use in the course of general research.  Apps for research I have to say that ever since the iPad first came out in 2010, I new that I was eventually going to get one. Not because one of the first case studies of the iPad at work was at an excavation in Pompeii, but because I thought it was a perfect fit for the kind of archaeological material I was studying – rock art, and thus essentially pictures. I got my first iPhone and iPad last year, in 2011 (having never used an i-device ever before then), and since then I’ve been trying to find ways to use the thousands of apps available for archaeology. This is not the first list, but it’s my list of the apps that I use in my iPhone and iPad right now:  Apps for Fieldwork |
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