down looking camera

March 4, 2021 7:12 AM

Is there a type of camera I can put on a pole (the pole is around 4m tall and is 75mm thick) that looks downward so I can generate a sensible looking image?

The pole is on a boat. I want to generate a sort of top down view of the boat and sort of edit around the pole a bit and also not have it look super fisheeyed.

Is this something that clever cameras and camera software can do?

posted by Just this guy, y'know to Technology (7 answers total)

What are the dimensions of the boat and where is the pole? Some math will tell you what viewing angle the camera/lens will need to be able to see at that height to capture the entire boat. You probably want to add some to the boat dimensions if you want to get the water around as well.
posted by TheAdamist at 7:18 AM on March 4, 2021

Setting aside the editing out the pole part (not my area of expertise), there are countless varieties of camera mounts on the market that would let you mount effectively any camera to a pole with the lens facing down. Perhaps with an arm or something you could get the camera far enough away from the pole for it to not be distracting (though I'd worry about camera shake on a boat with an arm). I think your options will be much more open if you separate the camera mounting from the camera in this question.
posted by primethyme at 7:40 AM on March 4, 2021

If the boat is big, you'll need a wide angle lens to get all of it in the shot. Four meters isn't very tall, so even with a wide angle lens, you may not be able to get all of the boat in the shot.

Like primethyme says, you'll want to mount the camera so it's a bit away from the pole so there's less of the pole in the shot.

You'll also need to rotate the camera 180° to get what's behind the camera, and then stitch those two photos together.

If you just need one shot and this isn't something you want to do regularly, I think it would be a lot less trouble and you'd get much better results hiring someone with a drone to take a straight down shot of the boat. Then you don't need to worry about editing out the pole, stitching anything together, or figuring out how what lens you need to get all of the boat in the shot.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:53 AM on March 4, 2021

Do you need to view this live, or are you making a recording? If the latter, a 360 action cam might work. They typically have two 180+ degree FOV wide-angle lenses back-to-back, and do software stitching to produce a spherical panorama you can move around in editing. As far as I know, they aren't real-time, so if this is for eg: security or monitoring while underway, less useful.
posted by Alterscape at 8:39 AM on March 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

This seems like something a GoPro is made for.
posted by theora55 at 8:59 AM on March 4, 2021

Looks like you're in the UK? Take a look at some of the BBC series Winter Walks - I think the walkers use a 360 camera on a pole that maybe does what you want. I watched the Rev Richard Coles one - there's a wee bit of weirdness around the hand holding the pole, but it took me a while of watching to even realise they were holding a pole with the camera on, because it was mostly not visible. What I can't remember off the top of my head is exactly how good the downward view was, or whether it was mostly used for panoramas around the sides.

If that seems worth investigating, you could look at the credits and see if any of the camera/production people are on Twitter and ask them what kind of camera it was. You could try asking Rev Richard Coles on twitter as he's on there a lot, but I'm not sure he's very technically-minded, probably just held what was handed to him.

Of course it had a BBC budget, so might be more than you're able to spend, but worth a look. Also just a lovely series.
posted by penguin pie at 12:32 PM on March 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Seconding a GoPro/360 camera. The software can even be used to remove the pole virtually when the two image are stitched together.
posted by pixiecrinkle at 6:15 PM on March 4, 2021 [1 favorite]