A shot from above
by Anagha Mahesh
How about a camera that flies in the air just like a toy plane? Is it a toy camera or a real camera? It is indeed a proper camera, which can shoot upto 15 minutes of video or photo mid-air.
The camera — Phantom Go Pro Hero-3 Camera, with a quadcopter (four-winged tiny helicopter), is a brain child of a company in USA. The camera is fixed in the middle of a 4-winged small helicopter kind of thing (see pic). It comes with a monitor and battery operated remote with two joysticks for movement. The person operating this camera uses the monitor to view the images captured from the camera when in air. The camera can capture 60 shots within a second.
In India, only about ten people know how to operate this camera and one among the ten is Ramesh Sarkar, a photographer from city. Sarkar has been into photography since the past 35 years. Basically a Science graduate, he has many firsts to his credit — was the first person in city to use video coverage at a wedding, first to use a digital camera for wedding and the most recent and the coveted one, the first one to use an Aerial camera to shoot wedding videos and photos from the sky.
Apart from this, he has also done the wedding shoot for families of the Wadiyars, Cycle Agarbathi Brand, MPs and MLAs in city. He has made documentaries for Coorg Public School, Gonikoppa and KALS, Mysore. He was also the official Dasara photographer for covering the festivities in all its hues and colours from 1990-99 and again from 2006-12. Till date, he has shot more than 6,000 weddings! That’s quite a figure.
The Phantom Go Pro Hero-3 Camera was introduced to India in the year 2012 by AVCS Systems India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi. They are the only agents, distributors in the country. The company provides a 10-day training at Delhi for those who buy this camera.
Camera Stats
Cost: Rs. 4 lakhs
Weight: In all, 750 gms.
Batteries: Runs on a rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery (comes with 4 batteries in total).
Kinds of shots: Wide-shot, narrow-shot and a normal-shot.
Has the option of shooting both videos and photos upto 10 hours; once in air it can shoot upto a max of 15 mins.
Usage: Mainly for weddings and for big industrial plants and other industries.
Memory: 32 GB; expandable upto 64 GB.
Application: GoPro
Video type: mp4
Monitor: Wireless and 14” wide
Compatible with any smart phone, tablet or ipad.
A higher version of the same is on the anvil with a 3-wing Tricopter instead of the 4-winged Quadcopter.
For more details, contact Ramesh Sarkar, Sarkar Video Trix, Saraswathipuram on Mob: 99800-89345 or e-mail: sarkar.camera@gmail.com.
source: http://www.starofmysore.com / Star of Mysore / Home> Feature Articles / October 12th, 2013