camera tripod

 

Extreme Ice Survey

The Extreme Ice Survey documents rapid changes on glaciers across the Northern Hemisphere. It is the most wide-ranging glacier study ever conducted using ground-based, real-time photography. The Extreme Ice Survey uses time-lapse photography, conventional photography and video to illustrate the effects of global warming on the earth’s glacial ice. The Extreme Ice Survey team has installed 26 time-lapse cameras at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia, as well as a dozen positions for annual repeat photography in Iceland, the Alps and Bolivia. Collected images will be used for scientific evidence and as part of a global outreach campaign aimed at educating the public about the effects of global warming.

History

Nature photojournalist James Balog originated the Extreme Ice Survey in December 2006 after spending much of the previous two years photographing receding glaciers for National Geographic and The New Yorker. During his intensive exploration, Balog saw extraordinary amounts of ice vanishing with shocking speed. Features that took centuries to develop were sometimes being destroyed in just a few years—or even just a few weeks. This was geologic-scale change happening not in the dim past or distant future, but right here, right now, in our own time. Since these changes are the most visually dramatic and immediate manifestations of global warming on our planet today, Balog decided to establish the Extreme Ice Survey. The project would ultimately evolve into an intensive team effort, bringing together journalists and scientists, artists and engineers.


Mission

Why does the Extreme Ice Survey team go through the trouble of photographing melting glaciers? Because time-lapse photography provides precise forensic evidence of the reality of global warming and its effect on the earth. Because the Extreme Ice Survey will preserve a photographic echo of these landscapes long after they’ve disappeared. Because showing epochal change happening in the context of our lives alters fundamental human perception of our relationship to nature. Because science can use the Extreme Ice Survey photographic record to understand the mechanics and pace of glacial retreat, and how it relates to climate change; this is of vital importance in understanding how fast the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is contributing to the rise of global sea level.

Objectives

Balog founded the Extreme Ice Survey to produce forensic evidence of the dramatic effects of global warming. Relying on a revolutionary employment of time-lapse photography, the collective images of Extreme Ice Survey will illustrate the geologic and geomorphic changes affected by climate change. These changes are occurring much faster than scientific modeling had previously predicted. The visual record produced by these images will be an invaluable scientific tool for future research and environmental activism.

Collection of field evidence is only half of the task facing the Extreme Ice Survey. The other half is a global outreach campaign. During months of post-production work, the time-lapse images will be edited into video that reveals how fast climate change is transforming large regions of our planet. The images and video will then appear in long-form television specials, television news programs, a large-format book, radio content, magazine articles, exhibitions, multi-media presentations, lectures and on the Internet. The official project Web site can be found at www.extremeicesurvey.org. (See also www.jamesbalog.com)

Locations

The Extreme Ice Survey team has installed 26 time-lapse cameras in numerous sites across the Northern Hemisphere. Guided by the recommendations of glaciologists, the Extreme Ice Survey team deployed its cameras at accessible and photogenic sites that represented regional conditions well and had high scientific value. There are 15 camera placements spread throughout Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia, as well as a dozen positions for annual repeat photography in Iceland, the Alps and Bolivia.

Methodology

Extreme Ice Survey cameras are programmed to shoot once an hour, every hour of daylight, until late summer 2009. Each camera captures approximately 4,000 images per year for a total projected archive of more than 300,000 photographs by completion of the survey. Camera sites are accessed via foot, horseback, dogsled, skis, fishing boats and helicopters. Downloads of digital images occur as frequently as once a month to as rarely as once a year, depending on the accessibility of the site. The images will be edited into video and slide shows that reveal the speed with which climate change is transforming the earth.

The Extreme Ice Survey team is careful to gather data over a multi-year period. By capturing images in diverse locations throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the Survey is able to provide a more complete picture of the effect of global warming across different geographic regions than previous ground-based, time-lapse studies.

Equipment

The Extreme Ice Survey uses Nikon D-200 digital single lens reflex cameras powered by a custom-made combination of solar panels, batteries and other electronics. The operational health of certain cameras is monitored on a daily basis via an Iridium satellite uplink system designed and built exclusively for the Extreme Ice Survey by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Batteries will provide power during nights and overcast days. To compensate for dramatic swings in daylight hours at different times of the year, the Extreme Ice Survey team constructed customized intervalometers to trigger the cameras.

The cameras are protected by waterproof and dustproof Pelican cases. The cameras are mounted on Bogen tripod heads and secured against the arctic and alpine winds by a complex system of aluminum and steel anchors, and stainless steel aircraft cable guy wires. Each configuration weights 70 pounds or more. The setups must withstand winds as fast as 170 mph, temperatures as low as -40°F, blizzards, landslides, torrential rain and avalanches.

Field work timeline

  • December 2006 – April 2007: Engineer and construct time-lapse cameras
  • March 2007: Deploy cameras in Iceland
  • May 2007: Deploy cameras in Alaska
  • June 2007: Deploy cameras in Greenland and the Northwest United States
  • September 2007: Deploy cameras in the Alps
  • Fall 2007: Download all cameras except Greenland
  • Spring 2008: Return to as many sites as possible to check damage from winter. Download surviving images and repair equipment
  • Late Summer/Fall 2008: Return to a variety of camera sites and download pictures
  • Late Summer 2009: Download images and clear cameras and supports from field

James Balog

For the last 25 years, nature photojournalist James Balog has consistently broken new ground in the art of photographing the outdoors. His images have received international acclaim, including the Leica Medal of Excellence and the premier awards for both nature and science photography at World Press Photo in Amsterdam. Exhibitions of his images have been shown at more than a hundred museums and galleries from Greece to Paris, New York to Los Angeles. He was the first photographer ever commissioned to create a series of stamps for the U.S. Postal Service; the 1996 release featured America’s endangered wildlife.

Balog’s work has been published in numerous major magazines, including National Geographic, The New Yorker, Life, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Audubon and Outside. He is a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure, where he was featured in an October 2007 article about his efforts with the Extreme Ice Survey. Balog is the author of six books: Wildlife Requiem (1984), Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife (1990), Anima (1993), James Balog’s Animals A to Z (1996), Animal (1999) and Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest (2004). The documentary film, “A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn,” explores his thoughts about art, nature and perception.

In addition to his photographic credentials, Balog holds a master’s degree in geomorphology from the University of Colorado. His approach to nature photojournalism combines his analytical scientific background with an artistic eye and progressive methodology.

Extreme Ice survey partners

Research team

  • Dr. Jason Box – Researcher at the Ohio State University Byrd Polar Research Center and assistant professor of geography at Ohio State. Byrd was a contributing author of “Climate Change 2007,” the report for which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Vice President Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1994, Box has completed 14 expeditions to the Greenland ice sheet. An authority on the relationship between Greenland glaciers and the earth’s climate, he writes the Greenland entry for the American Meteorological Society’s annual “State of the Climate” report.
  • Dr. Daniel B. Fagre – Ecologist and climate change research coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey in Glacier National Park, Montana. With a background in wildlife biology and ecology, Fagre has a unique perspective on the broad changes being produced by global warming. He has been doing repeat photography on the dwindling ice masses of Glacier National Park for nearly two decades. Fagre is the author of the 2007 book, Sustaining Rocky Mountain Landscapes: Science, Policy and Management of the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem.
  • Dr. Tad Pfeffer – Researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Researchand professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Pfeffer’s research includes studies of the mechanics and dynamics of glaciers, and heat and mass transfer in snow. He has worked on glaciers for 30 years, including two decades of field work on Alaska’s Columbia Glacier. Pfeffer does extensive work with photography and photogrammetry of glaciers and landscapes, using the imagery to describe and analyze glacier changes. Pfeffer’s photography has appeared in numerous scientific publications, as well as American Scientist, GEO (Germany) and Geotimes magazines, BBC television productions, special exhibitions and in both the movie and book An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore.

Scientific advisory board

  • Dr. Mark Fahnestock, University of New Hampshire
  • Dr. Martin Truffer, University of Alaska
  • Dr. Neil Humphrey, University of Wyoming
  • Dr. Bernard Francou, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Quito, Ecuador
  • Dr. Jan Joughin, Polar Science Center, University of Washington

Oddur Sigurdsson, President, Icelandic Glaciological Society

  • Dr. Konrad Steffen, Director, Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado

Sponsors

The Extreme Ice Survey is funded by prominent research and scientific organizations, as well as several corporate partners.

Patrons

  • NASA
  • National Geographic Expeditions Council
  • National Science Foundation
  • Nikon
  • Leopard Communications

Corporate partners

  • Bogen Imaging
  • Panasonic
  • Pelican Products
  • The North Face
  • Rudy Project

How to Build a Panoramic Tripod Head

There’s some amazing software out there for panoramic photography. Various software packages warp, stitch and blend sequences of photos so that they (ideally) look like one big, high-resolution, panoramic shot. However, getting these shots to turn out perfectly isn’t easy when handholding your camera or using a normal tripod, especially when some parts of the image are fairly close to the lens. Panoramic tripods can cost hundreds of dollars, but making your own isn't that hard. Even better, it's dirt cheap.

Steps

  • Find the rotation/pivot point by doing the test described in the External Link below.
  • Cut a piece of wood for the base. Use a piece of very flat, thick (5/8” or so) oak plywood or a plank of hardwood. Make it about 5” by 4” (12 cm x 10 cm).
  • Cut the side. To make sure the camera has enough clearance when you swing it down, make the tripod a little over five inches tall. The width would be the same four inches as the base.
  • Line up the two four inch edges so that the side is sitting on top of the base to form an “L” (see the picture above). Drill holes up through the bottom of the base into the side and screw the two together. A little glue and maybe some bracing might help – the less flex the better.
  • Drill a hole near the center of the base. The exact distance from the side is critical as it will need to run through the center of the lens. So place your camera on a table and measure the height from the table to the center of the lens. This is the distance the hole in the base needs to be from the side.

    If you’re not using a swivel under the base, you’ll need a fairly large hole here, as you’ll need to install a socket (or “insert nut”) so the tripod can screw into the tripod head. The dimensions of that socket will depend on your tripod – if you’re planning to mount this to the screw that normally attaches to the camera, you want a “1/4-20” socket.
  • Make the hole in the side about 4 1/2 to 5 inches above the base – your camera will need room to swing downwards when you’re shooting a picture of the sky. It also needs to be in the same plane as the hole in the base. In other words, if you’re looking at the unit from the side, the side hole will appear directly above the base hole.
  • Cut the arm. To figure the length, start with that previously measured distance between the entrance pupil and the screw socket determined in step 1 – this distance is shown in green (it will be different for every camera). Add between a half inch and an inch on either side. The width need only be a couple inches.
  • Drill a hole at one end for the arm to attach to the side piece where it will pivot. Drill another hole 4 1/8 inches (or whatever your measurement is) down the arm towards its other end. This last hole is where the camera attaches, so it needs to be 1/4" wide. Insert a 1/4-20 thumb screw through this hole (1/4-20 means 1/4” wide, with a thread pitch of 20, which is the most common pitch).
  • Attach the arm to the side by using a flathead machine screw . You may have to gouge out a bit of the hole in the arm so the full head can sink into the arm and not hit your lens. Push the screw through the arm, then through the side, then use a washer and a wingnut to secure it.
  • (Optional) Cut a piece of wood about the size of the base for the swivel, preferably big enough so it sticks out a bit – that will allow you to put markings on it so you can see how many degrees you’ve swiveled. Drill a hole through the center of it, and push a flat head machine screw through it, then through the hole in the base. As with the hole in the arm, you will probably need to gouge out the hole in the swivel a bit so you can prevent the head from sticking out – that surface will need to be flush with the tripod. Secure the screw with washer and wingnut.
  • Install a socket or insert nut as described in Step 5 for the base section. Position it as near as possible to the center to maximize stability.
  • Sand all the parts. To finish things up, you can varnish, seal or paint, but don’t get any of it on the rotating surfaces – they’ll stick every time you adjust the arm or swivel. Attaching a small level is highly recommended.
  • Use your new panoramic tripod (and some software) to take gorgeous pictures.


    • Tips

    • Building your own panoramic head for an SLR isn’t too hard or expensive. The parts for the design shown here cost about $10 USD. Every part here is available where lumber can be purchased.
    • When using your new panoramic head, remember that it never pivots at the point where the camera is screwed into the arm – that joint stays put. Pivot at the arm and base as necessary, overlapping 20-50% between shots.


    Warnings

    • The downside is that the mount is only useful for a specific camera/lens combo. On the other hand, you can’t mistakenly mess up one of the critical adjustments once you’ve built it, and the homemade mount is as light as a couple small pieces of wood.


    Things You'll Need

    • socket
      socket
      Cut pieces of wood
    • A drill
    • A socket
    • Thumb screws
    • Flathead machine screws
    • Washers
    • Wingnuts
    • Insert nut,four pieces of wood, the base, side,arm and the swivel


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