The BurningCam Aerial Photo FAQ

Very simply, this is about taking low-altitude aerial photos of the Burning Man site, Black Rock City. This FAQ basically covers the year 2000, when I tried to do it using helium-filled balloons. In 2001 I tried using a large kite instead. However, I have yet to update this FAQ to cover the kite camera as well.

Well, imagine a cluster of large helium-filled balloons, tethered to the ground by a long line so they wouldn’t fly away. Dangling from the balloons was a small plastic frame containing one of two video cameras (either colour or black and white) and a still film camera. The video camera was supposed to transmit its pictures to a television and VCR at a ground station (a car) via a wireless link, and the film camera was triggered remotely via radio remote control. The frame was on a motorized platform that I could tilt downwards via remote control to film the ground, or tilt level with the horizon.

I got a BM DMV (Burning Man Department of Mutant Vehicles) art car licence and drove around the site in a vehicle base station to which the balloons’ tethers were tied, which let me take photos from various locations.

Okay. I’m a tech geek. Do you have any more details on the gear?

I’ve written up a separate technical FAQ, which is over here.

Well. It kind of worked. Short answer: the weather screwed me up.

Long answer: the gear worked nearly flawlessly. But the constant wind and dust storms that raged from Wednesday through to Saturday cruelly thwarted my plans. I had to use five four-foot helium balloons to get enough lift, and the large surface area of the balloons meant that even a light breeze pushed the whole rig along parallel to the ground rather than letting it rise. So I wasn’t able to get much altitude at all. (look at the photo above - you’ll notice the camera is hanging from the line to the side, not directly below the balloon as it would have had their been less wind) Random downdrafts would then blow the rig downwards. I had to grab the camera several times to prevent it from crashing into the ground.

Even more frustratingly, I wasn’t able to shoot any video as planned. The battery on my rented truck died and I had to get the thing jumpstarted. Twice. Since the battery was in such a precarious state I didn’t want to overload it further by powering a teevee set, VCR and video receiver as I’d planned to do, particularly since alternators don’t charge batteries properly when the vehicle isn’t actually in motion. Ah well. The wind was so crazy that the whole rig was bouncing around madly anyway. Any video footage I’d have got probably would be enough to induce motion sickness.

I also wasn’t able to take any photos of the Man as I’d hoped. You know... next year I’m takin’ a damn kite for kite aerial photography.

Sure. This was my third Burning Man. I expected wind, all right - just not the insane dust storms we had all week. Also, I hoped for a brief window of low wind or still air right around dawn on at least one or two days. This never really happened except, apparently, on Monday and Tuesday.

Unfortunately, I arrived Tuesday night because I had to pick up the helium in Seattle on Monday. I didn’t want to cross the border from Canada into the US with suspicious-looking tanks of gas, so I had to buy the gas in the States. But industrial gas suppliers aren’t open on weekends.

Well. I did. Just another Burning Man participant. No sponsors, companies or anything of the like. This why I am currently subsisting on a steady diet of noodles for the next month or two.

Kite aerial photography has a certain purity to it - just the wind, the kite and a camera. Balloons are a pain as you have to fill them with helium (a non-renewable resource*). And they’re horrendously vulnerable to windy conditions, as I’ve obviously learnt.

But I’ve always been a bit wary of kites. I never had any luck flying the damn things when I was a kid. They didn’t get eaten by trees, but did tend to dive suicidally into the ground. I didn’t really want to try my luck again, and I don’t want suicidal divebombing kites happening when I’ve got hundreds of dollars of gear hanging in the balance. However, my bad luck with balloons this year has me reconsidering things. I may try to learn how to fly kites for next year.

An excellent kite aerial photography resource, packed with amazingly beautiful photos, is Charles Benton’s page.

* - geeky footnote that I think is kinda cool... I’ll never be able to leave this planet, obviously. And nothing I touch will likely ever leave this planet. Except helium. Helium is so light it floats up into the upper atmosphere, eventually drifting out to space. Somehow it tickles me to know that the helium that was in my balloons and stuff will one day end up in outer space. Cosmic, man!

Yes. Turns out someone did. In 1996 a guy named Aaron Ferrucci sent a Nikon SLR camera up into the sky using a helium balloon.

So I guess I was scooped. I was hoping that my project would be a bit different, as I had a video rig on it and stuff. But I ended up not being able to use the video gear anyway. Also, I understand at least one other person or group tried to do a balloon camera this year as well. I’d be happy to hear from you how your project turned out, if you’re reading this!

Yep. I put a lot of work into the wretched thing, so damned if I won’t try to fly it again. I’ll probably bring a kite for medium to high wind conditions as well as the balloons for still air conditions. Then I suppose there’ll be light breezes the whole time next year, and I’ll be really, really pissed off...

Well, that’s not a frequently asked question. And I’m sure nobody cares, but the copyright terms for this site are here.