A low-cost, portable, video-camera system built by University of Bristol for the UK-DRA, RARDE Fort Halstead, permits in-field acquisition of terrestrial hyper-spectral image sets. Each set is captured as a sequence of thirty-one images through a set of different interference filters which span the visible spectrum, at 10 nm intervals: effectively providing a spectrogram of 256 by 256 pixels. The system is customized from off-the-shelf components. A database of twenty-nine hyper-spectral images sets was acquired and analyzed as a sample of natural environment. We report the manifest information capacity with respect to spatial and optical frequency drawing implications for management of hyper-spectral data and visual processing.