One part remote control car, one part camera, and two parts flash make up this all-terrain camera. The folks at Burrard-Lucas photography put together this guerrilla device to capture images of some of the world’s more dangerous wildlife like elephants and tigers (oh my!). This project furthers our opinion that great photographers need to be great hackers to get the shots they want.
[Thanks UC]
Very clever, first time the flash triggers, elephant gets annoyed and stomps the camera, wait for them to leave, then recover what remains of camera to sift through the debris to recover the memory card.
First comment was made without looking at the site and that’s almost exactly what happened.
Yeah you can tell the animals are aware of the camera in a lot of the shots, I did kinda think the whole point was *undisturbed* behaviour…
@chris
I’m thinking the point was more *unmauled* than *undisturbed*.
better design covering the camera with a cover and mounting a taser on it to electrify the kitty when it mauled the camera would have worked better.
Photos of lions getting tazed would have rocked!
Looks nice, but something should be done about dust on the lens. Perhaps a way to wipe it clean, protect it, or blast it with compressed air.
Totally shocked they didn’t adapt a store bought chassis like the eight thousand other versions of this.
I’m pretty sure the majority of animals are colorblind, so it could have been high visibility orange for easy retrieval.
SO FREAKING COOL!
I built an outdoor wheeled ROV years ago but this one is just beautiful!
very old article.
http://www.arrickrobotics.com/robomenu/probesg.html
@jim
Animals don’t see the same spectrum of color humans do, but they can see some colors. A lot of birds actually can see better than we do, red green blue and UV. Most snakes only see in black and white though.
Somebody tell these guys aboot FPV if they want to improve a little…
There’s entire forums dedicated to aerial phot by remote controle plane… and some guy with a RC car and a camera get the frontpage…
That quality work here pals…
@Coligny
Let me know when someone takes their rc plane to africa and takes pictures of awesome elephants.
I’d be happy to see pictures of the erupting volcano near Eyjafjallajokull from a rc plane… that would be interesting.
Well the behavior IS undisturbed, up to the point the shutter is released, if the faux shutter sound is enabled. Critters will notice the presence of the bot, see it as an unknown, and will approach it cautiously. That would be desirable.
Well. Have you thought to take a no-glow trail cam and adapt it to the vehicle? I’d like to purchase the vehicle with camera mount/remote control and add my own no-glow camera. :)