At the current configuration, the pole is approximately 6’ in length and weighs about 11lbs when fully collapsed. The length of the pole was a bit of an issue for me because it was a little cumbersome to stuff into a car; that said, I did manage to stuff it into a Kancil with minimum inconvenience. With a carry case or a shoulder strap, the pole could also be comfortably carried around in wide open spaces. In urban areas, I had to do a Gandalf impression and carry it like a walking staff (You shall not… pass!). Setting up was easy enough for one person, but something I didn’t really factor in was the amount of physical strength needed to operate the pole. Repeated collapsing and extending the pole, along with keeping the pole in balance when extended, requires a lot of upper body strength, especially when holding the pole is at maximum length. After three hours, I was positively tired and couldn’t extend the pole past 15’. I also managed to get some skin crushed between the telescoping sections – ouch! – and a righteous muscle ache the next day. I think two people would be able to operate the pole comfortably for a day, and a medium-to-large sized person could probably handle it alone. Hobbits would have a problem getting the camera to the top of the pole in the first place.

Future options
I’ve already mentioned that I’m not happy with the relatively narrow field of view at its widest setting (24 mm) and a wide-angle lens might be able to solve this. Another consideration was the video monitor – if you’ve noticed, I didn’t have any space of the pole to place the monitor, and most cases I propped in in the ground in front of me. It’s a bit of a strain to look down at the monitor to aim, especially on bright days, so perhaps I will find some way to mount the monitor to the pole to improve visibility. Maybe another creative use of a gorillapod? Finally, I might want to look into getting a tripod for the pole, perhaps adapting a large survey tripod to add some stability to the whole rig and take the stress out of balancing the pole. Of course, adding an additional tripod would also mean adding an extra load to the overall carry weight.

Total cost
I’ve had a couple of questions over how much this entire project cost me. My budget was US$1800. The breakdown for the items laid on in the parts list is as follows:
Hastings Hotstick + GPS Antenna mount + Carry Case: US$491
3/8″-1/4″ adapter: US$12
Gorillapod: US$6 (cheap imitation from a local camera equipment store)
Wireless remote: US$33
Fasteners: under US$5
Baby monitor (Video camera and monitor): US$250
Canon G11: US$500
Shipping and Handling (A little higher for me, since I’m based in Malaysia): US$300
Total: US$1600 (approx)
At time of writing this, this was the first time I actually sat down to count all the numbers together. I’m pleasantly surprised that I was under budget. I had expected to hit US$2,000.

Further Reading
The idea for a polecam is not a novel one, and I based my designs on a number of good suggestions out there on the web. For starters, check out the Pole Aerial Photography group on Flickr for great examples of shots, as well as a forum full of information for starters and practitioners. The West Lothian Archaeology Group was a helpful introduction to pole and kite aerial photography. Finally, this post from a real estate blog also provided great information about how to assemble a polecam from scratch.

I hope you enjoyed this series of posts on a using a pole camera for archaeology. If you make a polecam of your own, send some of your shots to me so that I can share it on this site!

2. Camera
The other important component of the polecam of course is the camera – in this case, a Canon G11. The G11 is a prosumer compact camera that has many of the functions of a DSLR. What I was really looking for was the ability to shoot in raw (as in raw data recorded by the camera’s sensor, opposed to the JPEGs that are pre-compressed). I also appreciated greatly this model’s articulating LCD screen which in some cases stood in for an external video monitor. The movable screen was really handy especially because it was hard to move the entire camera when it was being tethered to the end of a 6-foot pole. The downside of this camera for me was the not-wide-enough angle of the lens; compared to other cameras of its class, it was relatively more heavy (13 ounces). Other cameras you might want to consider using for your polecam is the Lumix LX3 by Panasonic, which is about half the weight and apparently a favourite among pole aerial photographers, or the Pentax Optio which has the advantage of being both light and waterproof, and also the Nikon Coolpix P6000, that at 28mm is even less wide than the G11, but has the advantage of inbuilt GPS.

The camera was attached to the pole in two parts – first, I used the GPS antenna attachment for the hastings pole, which had a 5/8″ head. I the connected this attachment to the camera using this 5/8″ to 1/4″ adapter.

3. Wireless Remote
The wireless remote was a little more tricky, because the usual infra-red remotes only have a range of five metres or 15′. For a period I was toying around with the idea of a really long USB cable, but the maximum effective distance a cable can carry a signal is also about 5 metres. Fortunately, there are quite a few third-party radio-frequency wireless remotes out there, with far longer ranges than the IR ones. This remote that I used has a range of 80m – more than adequate for my 10m requirement – and can be attached to the camera’s hotshoe or another 1/4″ screw thread.

4. Video monitor
I guess the video camera and monitor is strictly optional – if you didn’t mind adjusting the camera, raising the pole, shooting, collapsing and rechecking the shot every time. I think given enough practice, it would be possible to use the pole without a visual aid. I didn’t have this luxury, so I found a baby monitor and wireless camera from an electronics store. The camera was about the size of my finger and had a narrower frame of view than the camera; so if I could see it on the monitor, I could definitely capture it on the camera. There were still a couple of drawbacks with this system; if I used the camera zoom, the accuracy of the video feed was less effective so the video cam was only good for the wide shots. The second drawback – a major one – was the battery life of the camera itself – it only lasted half an hour! With that amount of time, you might be able to get one or two different locations, maybe three if you’re experienced. I might consider powering the camera directly with batteries, but this would add extra weight onto the rig, which would make it harder to control at the higher elevations.

5. Fasteners
Finally, the glue that holds everything together – or making sure that your thousand-dollar investment doesn’t fall off and shatter to pieces! I used a number of small gadgets to fasten the entire rig to the main pole, all of which I got from the hardware store. You probably would have noticed that the video camera was attached to the main camera using nothing but blu-tack and rubber bands. I was quite surprised that it held as well as it did, but it was pretty steady throughout the whole field test. Because the hotshoe space was used up by the video camera, the receiver for the wireless remote was attached to the side of the pole using a small gorillapod and then wired to the camera. Finally, the wire and the camera strap were fastened onto the pole using a ring clamp. The ring clamp acted as an insurance policy just in case the 5/8″-1/4″ adapter ever got dislodged. In reality, nothing in the rig ever came apart during the field test, although the adapter had to be tightened every now and then.

And that’s how I assembled my polecam. In the next post, the last of the series, I end off with some evaluative notes about the operation of the polecam, how it measured up against my requirements and show off my bleeding fingers. =D

For taking photographs at an elevation, I tested out the polecam this hole on a cliff wall which stood about 20′ high:

With the polecam extended to the corresponding height, I could get a shot and see the contents of the hole:

The same shot, with flash:

For elevated photography, the polecam is a great replacement for a scaffolding – up to a point. It enabled me to a get a camera up to most of the places that the scaffold didn’t cover and take photographs at close-range. The places I couldn’t reach even with the pole were at heights of greater than 30′, but at least with the polecam I could close up the parallax gap that much further. However, because the pole sways proportionately to the height of the pole, I found it necessary to take photographs as a relatively fast speed – 1/125 of a second, which, because the wall was well lit, was not much of an issue. But in places with less light I might need to use the flash or rely on other forms of artificial lighting. The swaying pole also makes macro photography impossible.

For low-altitude aerial photography, I tested the polecam on a surface littered with boulders. At ground level, the space looked like this:

By tilting the camera downwards at an angle and extending the pole to about 12′ off the ground, I could get a good overhead shot of the same space:

I think it would be a good way to get overhead shots of excavated pits or small spaces, but I haven’t tried anything on a larger scale yet. It should be said that the G11′s shortest focal length of 24mm still feels a little too narrow for me. I might try experimenting with a wide-angle or fisheye lens later.

What do you think? Does the polecam work? Any suggestions to make it work better? If you’re interested about assembling a polecam on your own, you can read about the parts I used in Part 3 of the series.

For the first half of the year, I experimented with outfitting a radio-controlled helicopter with a small camera. I started with a simulator, learnt how to hover, and even got as far as a helicopter (an Esky Big Lama, the largest contra-rotating helicopter of its class). It turned out that even the most “stable” helicopters were stable provided there was no wind. So it was useless outdoors, and besides, it could only carry a 50g (yes, gram) load with hampered mobility. Also, hovering radio-controlled helicopters is *extremely* hard to do, requiring months of practice (not to mention extra money, since crashes are expensive). To carry something like a DSLR camera would take far more money than the original scaffold, plus a considerable investment in time to master flying one of these things – neither of which I had.

To sum up the problem and the operating constraints, what I needed was the ability to take high-quality photographs from a stable, elevated platform that could reach heights of 35 feet. This system had to be portable, operable by one person, and cost much less than what I spent on the scaffold. Since I was going to use my personal funds for this project, my budget was around SGD2,500 (about MYR6,000 or USD1800).

Earlier this year, someone posted a comment on kite aerial photography, and through the link I stumbled upon Pole Aerial Photography, which as the name implies, is a camera set atop a pole for low-altitude aerial photography. I haven’t seen anyone do it in this part of the world, and it looked like something that was quite easy to put together. So after months of research and a little poorer, this is what I got:

So what did I put together and how did it work? Read on in the next instalment of the series, Part 2: The Field Test.

Mangyan in Cebu
By Joeber Bersales

No need to climb the steep and cold mountains of Mindoro to get a glimpse of the culture of one of the last four indigenous groups in the country that still use the syllabary (or baybayin) that antedates the Spanish colonial period by centuries. Well, not just yet. The Mangyan Heritage Center (MHC) and the University of San Carlos (USC) Museum opened yesterday a traveling exhibit entitled “The Mangyans of Mindoro: Myth and Meaning” – and admission is absolutely free.

The Mangyans, which number about 100,000, are composed of eight ethnolinguistic groups that call Mindoro their home. The more well known of them are the Hanunoo, Buhid and Iraya, which were subjects of pioneering studies published by anthropologists in the previous century.

Since last year, MHC has been bringing facets of Mangyan life through photographs, crafts and a video presentation in selected institutions in Manila. This year, the traveling exhibit has moved to central Philippines with the museum-like presentation of the artifacts of Mangyan life helping the viewer appreciate the wealth of indigenous life – and perhaps a glimpse at how our ancestors lived.

The exhibit at USC, made possible with the able leadership of USC Museum curator Marlene Socorro Samson, runs till Nov. 17 and is highlighted with a lecture by Dr. Antoon Postma, a Dutch anthropologist who later married a local Mangyan lass while doing work in Mindoro. That lecture will be held at Buttenbruch Hall, USC Main Campus, on Thursday, November 16, at 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.

A small shop has been set up within the exhibit where one can buy crafts and beadwork made by Mangyans. I espied a letter opener made of bamboo with a poem in Mangyan syllabary etched on one side. For just a mere 25 pesos, it’s a lasting souvenir from a people that have remained resilient amidst the onslaught of modernity.

MHC should be lauded for taking up the cudgels for preserving and promoting Mangyan culture. More and more of the fascinating aspects of indigenous or native life in the 100 or so ethnolinguistic groups of the country struggle daily to survive the effects of modernization.

Established in 2000, MHC continues to serve as the major repository of Mangyan indigenous knowledge, which gets published in the form of books, theses, and photographs. At Calapan, Oriental Mindoro, where it is based, the center conducts research and continues to document the oral and written traditions of the eight Mangyan groups on the island. It is akin to the Cebuano Studies Center at USC, which continues to be the sole repository concerning Cebuano history and culture in the world.

Plans are afoot to carry out an archaeological study of a site in Bantayan island in north Cebu that has been the subject of periodic looting by local residents. If this pushes through, a team from the National Museum and the Committee on Sites, Relics and Structures of the Cebu Provincial Government will collaborate to carry out excavations with the cooperation of landowners sometime in the middle of November till early December.

If anyone is interested to volunteer for these excavations, please email me for more details which I may be able to provide once things are finalized.

Books about the archaeology of Philippines:
- Glances: Prehistory of the Philippines by J. T. Peralta
- The Tinge of Red: Prehistory of Art in the Philippines by J. T. Peralta
- Filipino Prehistory : rediscovering precolonial heritage by F. L. Jocano
- Filipino Prehistory : rediscovering precolonial heritage by F. L. Jocano
- Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino and other essays in Philippine history by W. H. Scott