Aerial Photos From a Helium Balloon

Today Bruce Vinal of Concord, MA showed me some of his recent aerial  real estate photos that he took from a helium balloon. My favorite one is the one above that was taken from about 75 feet. Bruce says:

“I’ve got about $2,000 into my equipment right now but that number is sure to rise. I bought bits and pieces all over the web and fabricated the rest.The actual balloon is from Southern Balloon works I use a Nikon CoolPix-7900. It’s a good, lightweight (very important) 7 mega-pixel camera. The Nikon is mounted on a homemade aluminum frame that, using r/c servos, can pan tilt and trip the shutter. I bought a video down-link from Black Widow AV that allows me to see, on the ground ,what the camera sees in the air”

It seems to me this technology (a helium balloon) is a great alternative for doing real estate photography since it is relatively inexpensive compared to a mast or heli-cam or flying around in an airplane and it seems like it would be versatile and easy to operate.

My comment to Bruce was that I’d be inclined to use a camera that you could put a wide-angle adapter on so you could get a wide view without having to go up so high. I don’t believe a CoolPix-7900 has lens threads so you can add a wide-angle converter… I could be wrong but I think 38mm is the widest angle you can go with the 7900.

UPDATE:

I was wrong the CoolPix 7900 does have a wide angle adapter It can go down to 16 or 20mm.