Capturing Avian Perspectives: Pigeon photography
daviddegner.comNow we just need a Prodigy - Smack My B Up pigeon parody
I have a pet pigeon. My partner wants to do some sort of a lifestyle video of him with little miniature kitchen, living room, etc. Sorta like Martha Stewart, only with a black carrier pigeon.
He comes running when called, and he really likes bossing the dogs around, so I think we could actually do something like this.
Just wait until you get this ear-worm into your ear. I'm probably 25 of the 27 views:
Related: Some very old pigeon photography in a scrollable story from Google Arts & Culture
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/julius-neubronner-an...
I appended `?hl=en` to force the selection of the English language, you may want to remove it (it ignores `fr` or `es`, but it is available in German).
I guess that bird could be spying on you. Jokes aside, this is natural drone photography.
I can imagine you would be even more successful with targeted photography from a trained bird.
Yeah, the targeted photography is my next step. I live in Brooklyn, and my pigeon raising friend lives in Jersey, so if we release the bird from the right place in Brooklyn we should be able to get some interesting photos of Manhattan.
Consumer tech has improved so we can attach cameras to pigeons again once again.
as drones are illegal in many places and are just targetted on the battlefield like in Ukraine, I wonder when we are going to get drones looking (and with time more and more behaving) like a bird.
I hope not. Imagine how devastating conflict already is to the environment. Now make every bird shoot on sight, just in case.
I guess ravens really are the dark one's eyes and ears!
Or what if they made guided missiles out of pigeons?
Stranger things have been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
The See Also section is a huge rabbit hole it will take me days to review all this litterature around bomb bearing animals
In addition to spy photography, pigeons were being trained to guide missiles at one point by pecking on a screen. Project Orcon (for ORganic CONtrol) was the name of the program. It doesn't appear to have been used for any actual bombings. The trainers said their biggest issue was just getting people to take them seriously. The project was canceled as electronic controls became available.
Brilliant, this is giving me ideas. Growing up, I built multiple pigeon nest to house them around the houses in my hometown and I remember feeding them, and making up my own stories. I think, I sold them for religious ceremonies but I'm sure they comes back to the same homes later.
Now, why shouldn't I start a Pigeon photography/videography thingy and scan the entire town. No need for drones, no nothing, just pigeons with wi-fi-ed cameras that offloads the content as they comes back home every evening.
Ah! That's my hyperspectral imagery source to train the ML-pipelines. What if LIDARs become cheap enough to be fitted on the pigeons? Now, that would be super interesting.
David Degner! What a legend.
Hey! I know who this is! It has been too long. Call me up if you come to NYC!
Very interesting but to be pigeon's perspective the eye of the camera should have same resolution, color sensitivity, depth etc of a pigeon. If not it is just another drone shot.