How-to:
- Acquire a standard Canon 990 IS for around $300. Buy an extra battery and two large SD HC cards (4GB cards are easier, but 32 GB will work with more difficulty)
- other Canon pocket cameras can work, but you will have to adapt the intervalometer script yourself.
- Email me (markz@courtneyaviation.com) to get the file. Unzip and copy all of the files onto the cameras SD HC Card. Print out the README.TXT.
- Make sure the battery is fully charged before flight.
- Mount the camera or set it a window cushioned by foam or even rags. datatoys.com makes a great suction cup mount. see youtube video.
- Turn on before flight, and load the speical BIOS according to the README.TXT.
 - Shoots every 30 seconds non-stop until the battery runs out (over 4 hours), or until you turn it off
- Shutter Speed is the highest possible
- Optical Image Stabilization is on, but this does not help much with airplane vibration
- Focus is set to infinity
- There is no F stop, only a cut filter, and this is turned off
- None of this needs to be changed, it is just informational, but you can modify if you want
 - Dampening helps a lot: foam, rubber bands, seatback, suction cups or even just laying the camera on your jacket.
- Places to locate: Seatback, corner of the windshield, back side window, taped on to anything that will hold it
- Tripods can work in the back, but are harder to dampen vibration. Try it, because your plane may not vibrate too much.
- Create a little mounting kit of clamps, paper clips, micro tripods, gaffing tape, string/cord, etc.
Viewing:
- Simply place the SD HC in your computer's SD HC slot or USB reader
- A dialogue box will pop up asking if you want to open Explorer to view. Click it
- Window's standard Explorer will show the files as thumbnails or filmstrips.
- Choose a photo (probably by time-stamp or visualizing the thumbnail) and double click it
- Better viewing software is available like Thumbsplus, but this is a personal preference that you choose and pay for
 - DeLorme Software, XMap and Topo 7 will auto-process the photos to their GPS track and lay them out over a map
- Sync the camera's clock to the GPS as accurately as possible before flying.
- After flying place your full SD HC chip in the computer and start DeLorme
- Find the Geo-tagging wizard in DeLorme Yopo or XMap, and run it
- This is a very cool presentation, but you may end up overlapping circles of photos
- Try to eliminate less interesting photos before geo-tagging
- You might use this method to choose which photos to upload to Google Earth, or leave all of these photos for dispatch to look at while you go fly again
Geo-Tagging for Google Earth: - Pict'Earth is a application for choosing and uploading photos into Google Earth: http://pictearth.com/missions.html
Archiving:
- You will get lots and lots of Gigabytes. Choices for managing photos:
- Delete photos after each flight, unless something happed that should be saved.
- Save the chips. Buy lots of SD HC (4GB are relatively cheap this year), load a fresh one each time and keep the used chips intact
- Buy a 1000 GB external disk for $100, and copying files over to the disk. The erase from the camera.
Something fun: This configuration can also be used to make fantastic HD time-lapse movies of clouds, flowers, day passage, etc. (taking a days worth of photos is the easy part...editing movies, especially HD is not easy). There are extensive resources on the web about chdk and how to use it.
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