Dave Stevenson
With a little bit of imagination and ingenuity, it’s possible to take pictures that are truly out of this world, without costing the earth.
I’ve always wanted to go into space. The initial surge of adrenaline of achieving a life-long dream, a period of mystified wonder and amazement at the sheer scale of everything, followed by the crushing realisation that you’ll eventually have to return to a troubled planet populated mostly by stupid people.
Various things prevent me from going. I’m prone to travel sickness and the prospect of clearing up tiny specks of vomit in zero gravity sounds disgusting. I didn’t much like my maths teacher at school, either, with the result that I’m as numerate as the cast of America’s Next Top Model. And, although I’m tempted by Richard Branson’s latest wheeze of charging just over a hundred and thirty grand to fly nearly in space, I would need to write literally tens of MacUser columns to afford it.
But if you can’t reach space, you can always look at pictures of it. The trouble is, if you want to take pictures of it, you’re going to need to prepare to spend some serious cash. For instance, when Nasa was refitting its astronautical photography gear, it opted for 11 top-of-the-line Nikon D3s’s and seven 14-24mm f/2.8 lenses. Assuming it bought them off the peg, it spent in the region of fifty grand. And that doesn’t get us around the problem of finding a seat on a shuttle.
Late last year, a pair of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had a similar yearning to photograph from altitude and, like me, wanted to photograph the Earth without spending well into six figures. Unlike me, though, they had the time (to say nothing of the mental horsepower) to do something about it.
The idea is so simple it’s been done dozens of times. Take a camera and a balloon. Attach the camera to the balloon, fill the latter with helium, and let her rip. What’s interesting about this is the price. They put together a small point-and-shoot camera (a Canon A470 worth about £50 in today’s money), a weather balloon and some helium. To help them track where their balloon came down, they included a cheap mobile phone with a GPS chip. The total cost of their project was a shade under $150 (about £104), and after checking that their experiment wasn’t going to clip an airliner on the way up, they launched. When the balloon reached its elastic limit, it burst, and the camera assembly and GPS tracker floated back to Earth beneath a parachute.
The results were spectacular. Project Icarus climbed 17-and-a-half miles vertically. That’s 92,000 feet, or roughly three times higher than you can expect to be on a transatlantic flight. It was a literally stratospheric achievement, and the pictures the students got back, taken at a rate of 12 per minute, were stunning.
This came to mind because the Brits are getting in on the act as well. In March, a Yorkshireman named Robert Harrison launched a similar project from his back garden, this time for £500. He got more bang for his buck, though, with one of his helium-powered efforts climbing to more than 100,000 feet. He returned some amazing images and plenty of cheap gags at the expense of the newly minted, single-astronaut UK Space Agency.
If this doesn’t put you in the mood for a little remote-control photography, our next contenders will. Matt and Will Burrard-Lucas, a pair of wildlife photographers, got tired of shooting their subjects with massive telephoto lenses. Some wide-angle photographs were what they needed, but how to get them? The solution was BeetleCam, a frankly mental remote-control contraption consisting of four off-road wheels, a chassis and a battery. A Canon Eos 400D and a pair of flash guns were mounted to the top and the whole lot was promptly dragged into the bushes and mauled by a lion.
But the rest of the pair’s images speak for themselves – a series of shots of elephants and water buffalo taken from angles you simply wouldn’t be able to get if you were actually behind the camera. Remote photography – infrared traps and the such – has always seemed like a rather clinical exercise to me, but throw in the possibility of space exploration or a remote-control buggy getting pictures from the feet of elephants and I’m in.
Perhaps what I like best about these two stories is that neither involves top-end gear. Our intrepid space cowboys used out-of-date compact cameras that no serious nerd would be seen with, while the 400D used by the Burrard-Lucas brothers is getting on for four years old. Partly this embracing of older camera technology is because progress is slowing down somewhat: a four-year-old camera doesn’t present anything like the restrictions a camera the same age would have in 2005. Between 2001 and 2005, we had the jump between essentially no megapixels – I quite clearly remember a time when 3.2 megapixels was the bee’s knees – and having eight or more as a sensible minimum. More than the technical aspect, though, this issue’s heroes didn’t need to use the latest or meatiest equipment because the amazing things they were photographing – space or elephants’ toenails – transcended relatively petty arguments about ISO performance or frames per second. That and the fact it’s easier to defend the loss of a half-decade-old PowerShot into the Irish Sea than it is a top-end DSLR.
All of this was going to culminate in me urging you not to send your camera into space or trundling it into the path of heavy wildlife, and to simply focus on knowing your camera’s limitations and taking the best pictures possible with what you’ve got. Instead, I absolutely urge you to push your gear to the edge of destruction. Take stock of how much gear you have and how much you can afford to lose, then sacrifice the lot in an effort to get the most spectacular picture possible. A Mars bar to the first person who manages to get some decent shots by attaching a camera to the outside of a deep-sea robotic submarine. At any rate, that has to be easier than getting into space.
