Kite Aerial Photography - Getting Started

I've been into photography for as far back as I can remember. I guess I've always been a bit of a gadget hound. As a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere an old camera was a pretty impressive gadget. I'm pretty sure it was several years before my parents decided to let me have any film to put in the camera, but that didn't stop me from taking photographs of all kinds of things. When I finally did get some real film for the camera I adopted the spray and pray technique of photography without realizing it. This technique is used in many other areas as well. In photography the basic idea is take a bunch of photos and hope something comes out good. My parents weren't as impressed with this technique as I was, so it was a while before I saw real film again.

Over the years I slowly developed my photographic skills as my interest in photography came and went. When I got my first digital camera I found myself reverting to spray and pray and had to force myself to carefully compose my shots. This happened again when I got my first digital SLR, and I'm still working on getting back to good technique again.

Several years ago I stumbled across an article about Kite Aerial Photography. Basically you hang a camera below a kite, fly it up nice and high, and take some photos. At the time my interest in photography as a hobby was high, but I didn't have a lot of free time, so I filed it for something to look into later. I eventually forgot about it, being busy with other things, but today everything came together for me to get started. My photography interest is pretty high right now and I've got a trip to the beach coming up soon, a great place for my first try. Adding to that, today was a nice rainy day so I was stuck indoors all day.

I knew I'd have to build some kind of rig to hang a camera below my kite, but really didn't know what it would involve. After doing a little research online I snuck down to the basement while my wife was busy doing something else. The part of the rig that keeps the camera level when attached to the kite string is called a picavet. I decided to go with a small wooden frame for my picavet due to the materials I had on hand. On top of the frame are four screw eyes, below there are three for suspending the camera mount. I used yellow mason's line for the line of the picavet, probably not the best choice, but it is what I had on hand.

Originally I was going to use rubber bands to attach my iPhone directly to the bottom of the picavet, but this would only allow me to take shots straight down. I added three screw eyes to the bottom of the picavet frame, two for the sides of the camera mount, and one for the rear. The camera mount I came up with is very simple, it is just a piece of plexi glass that I can mount an iPhone or a small digital camera to. There are holes in both of the top corners of the plexi glass to allow zip ties to attach it to the screw eyes below the picavet, forming a simple hinge. There is another hole at the bottom of the mount, halfway between each of the side holes. This hole is attached to the third screw eye at the bottom of the picavet with a short piece of mechanic's wire. The mechanic's wire allows me to adjust the angle that the camera hangs at from 0 to 90 degrees. It can be a bit of a pain to adjust, but it seems more rigid than zip ties or string.

Testing the Rig As you can see this is a pretty basic Kite Aerial Photography rig. The camera that I will be using has a built in interval timer so I will be going back to the spray and pray technique yet again with this adventure. I'll probably set it to take a photo every 30 seconds and pray that I get at least a few decent photos to share.

If this works out I'm sure I'll find myself building a bigger rig to support my digital SLR with a radio control trigger as well as pan, and tilt controls. Check back in a few weeks to find out how this project worked out.