Well, here’s something you don’t see every day.
It’s interesting how the thing first tumbles, then stabilizes as it probably hits terminal velocity. Also that it stabilized looking down, and not up, which made it all the more interesting.
9 thoughts on “A Camera Falling Into A Pigpen”
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Makes sense. Think of the lens assembly as the dart and the camera body as the feathers.
I don’t think the camera stabilized. Given that the ‘flutter’ sound doesn’t change, and the striped look of the image, I’d bet that the camera started spinning at a multiple of the sensor update rate.
Actually, it spun up until the rotation rate was a low multiple of the frame rate- thus the distorted sky-earth-sky image. I love the curious pig immediately investigating this odd object that fell from the sky. Bright, curious creatures they are- and good eatin’.
That near-perfect match might defeat this software:
http://petapixel.com/2013/02/24/new-spinning-image-stabilization-gives-a-balls-view-as-it-flies-down-the-field/
Details:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kkitani/Publications_files/HSKK_AH2013_ext.pdf
I was going to argue that synchronizing to just the right angular rate would be unlikely, and the natural stabilizing torque which develops when the CP is behind the CG is well known.
But, on a second look, I’m not sure this is even real. E.g., at 40 sec, the Sun is in two places in the frame. What kind of lens captures that? I think this is movie-shopped.
The video was most likely taken with a GoPro or with a digital camera with a CMOS sensor. Such cameras use rolling shutters, if the camera is rotating at a rate faster than the shutter then it’s possible for weird effects to occur, including things like parts of the image appearing multiple times in a single frame.
Also, there’s no way whatsoever that anyone would think of using this sort of effect intentionally, it’s just too bizarre.
Eh, I may have started out the gate badly, picturing in my mind a professional camera with significant lens assembly. It may have been some Flip camera or something.
Still, seems a bit too convenient and odd to me. I don’t think it would be hard to stitch together a vid like this from a few shots. God knows, some people seem to have the time on their hands. Look at all the crap on YouTube.
The bit that puzzles me is the shallow angle that the camera seems to be coming in at, it looks like its vertical speed is much lower than its horizontal speed. If it was low drag it would gain a lot of speed falling from 300 meters (?) (freefall Vf ~80m/s) about as fast as that aircraft was likely traveling at, if it was high drag its vertical speed would have been lower but so would its horizontal speed.
All up I would have expected it to hit the ground with a higher vertical speed than horizontal speed, three obvious explanations are:
1. that the pig pen was on ground sloping away from the falling camera (but the ground looks flat!)
2. that the aircraft was lower than my guess of over 300m.
3. that the spin of the camera gave it some lift.