Posts Tagged ‘aerial photography’

My friend Randy Feist has a pumpkin farm in Kuna, ID.

• Quite an operation: pumpkins, corn maze, petting zoo, mini-pumpkin slingshot, hay bale maze, hay rides, etc.
• I didn’t quite get the pictures I wanted – a view of the whole 35 acre party and a few pictures of just the corn maze.  I’m starting to think that real-time video of what the camera is seeing might be handy.
• I added a servo to the setup, which should have caused the rig to automatically pan left and right, for a total range of 180 degrees.  Not sure it worked though, mostly because I couldn’t get the screw connecting the servo to the rest of the rig tight enough – so the servo was rotating, but not really taking the rig with it.
• In spite of these difficulties, we got some pretty good pictures…

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Last weekend we spent an hour or two playing around with the kite and camera at Barber Park

• Table Rock
  
  
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Making your own kite might sound a little dorky.

However, a few points to consider:

• This kite is 6 feet tall and 5 feet wide.
• It’s called a Rokkaku.  Rok for short.
• It’s a Japanese fighter kite
• It can easily lift a camera for taking pictures
• It has an angry face on it.

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I’m trying to use the kite/camera rig to get the perfect “how the heck did you take that?” picture of the Boise river / capital building /foothills, and hopefully a few people floating down the river too.   So yesterday I went over to Barber Park and played around with the camera/kite combo for about half an hour.

• If I’d angled the camera about 30 degrees to the left I would have gotten a great picture of table rock and the river – much closer to the “perfect picture” I was after. But I think this looks cool anyway.
  
  
• Apparently they’re growing something on the roof of this building.
  
  
• I really need to put together a suspension system so the pictures aren’t so blurry all the time.

Last weekend Ben’s sister Beth came to visit.  We decided to take a road trip to Northern Idaho, an area that Ben and I hadn’t yet explored.  There’s a popular destination called Coeur d’Alene which is on a lake in a mountainous area.  Also we heard about a cool rails-to-trails bike trail that we were really excited to try out.

We drove 7-hours Friday night and Saturday morning to get to Coeur d’Alene.  The drive was long, but really pretty – windy mountain roads, rivers and canyons, golden-colored wheat fields, and small towns.  After arriving, we had the afternoon in Coeur d’Alene, so we took out the kite to take some photos… you can see a few of those in Ben’s last post.  Here’s another good one, and also a photo of our reward after a long day of driving and kite-flying.

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• Location: Coeur d’Alene Lake in Idaho
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• New kite: the Sutton FlowForm 8.  The 8 is for 8 sq ft of material.  Serious Aerial photographers use the FlowForm 30, an 8′ Rokkaku, a Powersled 81, or some other enormous kite.
  
  
  
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• The basic setup – an eye-hook bolt tied to a $20 kite. I set the camera to take a picture every 2 seconds
  
  
  
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