Notes on Kite Aerial Photography: Miscellaneous
See
also the Thumbnail Gallery Index page and the In the Queue page
for images from the most recent photo sessions -- new posts in Thumbnails during
August 2003.
School is underway again and for the first
time I am teaching a documentary photography course under the aegis of our
Visual Studies program -- Great
fun.The images above show David Wagner with his remarkable 400 ft2 Doug Hagaman
airfoil. This is an impressive kite! More
images of our brief but pleasant test flight can be found in the Thumbnail
Gallery section. (Canon
S400 Digital Elph, September 2004).
This page provides a reverse chronological accounting of
additions, modifications, and general news related to the site. Whether you are a
frequent
or occasional visitor this is the place to find
out what's new and
amusing.
20
October 2005
- Benton lives. And I have actually been very active in KAP. For a glimpse into
my current project take a look at the
Hidden
Ecologies Blog.
10 August 2004 - I have been an occasional contributor to Bay Nature, a local periodical addressing San Francisco Bay as a natural heritage. Their last call for images focused on the salt evaporation ponds of San Francisco Bay -- one of my favorite haunts during the last couple of years. It seemed fitting that I submit a few images for their perusal.
In yet another thumbnail gallery I have posted
images from the Baltic Sea
islands of Christianso and Frederickso. Claudia and I visited there in early
August and found them to be a delightfully peaceful spot. Take a look.
20 July 2004
- I am having a fabulous time in Denmark and can report that the clouds
have parted after an almost continuous month of overcast, rainy weather. My trip
revolves around a stint as a visiting professor at the Danish International
Studies Program. In the Architecture & Design part of the DIS program around half of the work takes place
in the center of Copenhagen and the other half during road trips around
Copenhagen and extending into Western Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. It is an
architect's delight!
If you would like to look over my shoulder a bit I have posted a collection of informal images from Scandinavia in my thumbnail gallery section. By and large these were taken during very brief windows of opportunity when favorable weather coincided with a brief stop on the road.
13 July, 2004 - Wow, it has been quite the while since I have posted an update. This I attribute to a particularly busy period at the university and a pleasant summer teaching stint in Copenhagen (from which I post this note).
My
first note of interest is a major one. Brooks Leffler is now offer a kit version
of his radio-controlled cadle design for small cameras. This is a fantastic
development that makes advanced KAPing available for folks who are less inclined
to tinker. As one might expect, Brook's practical nature and years of KAPing
experience have yielded a cleanly designed cradle that is very reasonable
in price. See Brook's WWW site for more information:
http://www.brooxes.com/newsite/BBKK/index.html
I believe Brook's cradle combines an ideal entry
point to KAPing with features that will serve you for a long time. Bravo Brooks!
21 December, 2003
- While at KAPiCA '03 I heard a cautionary tale from friend Wolfgang Bieck
about kite spars. Wolfgang had a kite spar fail while his camera rig was over
water with consequent loss of rig. It was a frame he had used successfully for
many years thus the failure was sudden and unexpected. Little comfort that. I
immediately checked -- by visual inspection -- the beloved eight-year old
ProSpar Comp frame I use in my Kevin Shannon Rokkaku. It seemed just fine.
I was out today to test my new Canon SD10 rig in light winds. A brief flight
of my Sutton 30 suggested that the Rokkaku would be needed. While rigging up the
Rok I looked down and a spar had buckled right where it meets the vertical
spine. I could hardly believe my eyes as little force had been applied. I am
extremely lucky this happened on the ground! I them tested each of the framing
sections by bending them forcefully over my knee, rotating the stick 45 degrees
and bending again... All seemed well except the center section of the other spar
make a faint creaking noise. I applied more pressure and it too snapped. Yikes.
2 October, 2003 - I've just returned from a three-week stint at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. This trip, in retrospect, was a fine tonic. The formulae is straightforward. The Atlantic Center set's a theme -- in this case WindArt -- and invites three master artists to lead a residency. The master artists choose around two dozen associate artists to participate with attention to their contributions to the breadth and creative potential of the mix. In our case the group ranged from photographers and sculptors to opera composers and aerial dancers. All participants assemble at the center's handsome facilities in New Smyrna Beach, Florida where a casual commons, top notch studios, and modest on-site residential accommodations encourage collaboration. Great fun!
ACA Associate Artist Cassandra Jones
photographed during the first flight of a recently constructed Rokkaku (Canon
S400 Digital Elph, September 2003).
11 August, 2003 - Perhaps I am encountering anecdotal evidence for global warming. Of late I have been constantly struggling with thermals as I fly the Rokkaku. The now familiar cycle begins with the kite flying at a steep angle. It then strains at the line as warm, buoyant air works its charms. As the kite reaches, or occasionally over flies, the zenith it becomes unstable. I am generally spooling line out at this point and I can report a number of occasions when the kite pulls same aloft at a remarkable rate. On occasion the kite exits the thermal upside down -- yikes. Less often it stalls and drops downward at an alarming rate. Neither scenario is fun.
The image at right is a plan view image taken today while the kite was straining at its leash directly overhead. I am visible near the center of the image at the end of the line. The kite was upside down with the camera aloft twice before I could get the camera down. When I did secure the rig I called it a day.
A plan view of your author at the end of the
kite line.
9August, 2003
- It is hard to be a KAPer without eventually having a tree story. For instance,
see Simon Harbord's tale of tree adventure(you
have to love happy endings) or
another Harbord
account that is more cautionary. I have just conducted my own dance with a
lofty Eucalyptus and you can read about it here.
14 July, 2003 - I continued shooting scenes in Contra Costa County this week with the highlight being a lovely afternoon in the Altamont Hills east of Livermore, California (think Rolling Stones and Hells Angels). Nowadays, the area is well known for its 7,000 or so wind generators. These kinetic elements make an already convoluted landscape surreal. You can see more on the Altamont Hills thumbnail gallery page.
WInd generators populate a hill near Paterson
Pass Road in the Altamont Hills. .
12 July, 2003 - My project over the last week has been taking photographs in neighboring Contra Costa County. The effort is in support of an article planned by Diablo Magazine on my kite photography. The editors reasonably wanted images from their geographic area of focus so it has been my pleasant, albeit warm, duty to travel the county flying a kite. Results to date are posted in the form of thumbnail gallery pages.
I continue to play with Panotools and have found it a fine complement to Photoshop, my mainstay image editing program. In particular, I have been using Panotools as a post hoc composition agent. As in the image of Contra Costa housing development to the right, Panotools allow me to combine the desirable features of two or more images in the creation of a final image. The housing shot is montages from two separate images -- one with the foreground buildings but absent the horizon, the other with horizon but absent foreground. In the end I am left with an images far wider (or in this case taller) than the S400 Digital Elph optics would have allowed. Great fun.
I have also put together a quick page describing
my experience of dunking the S400 Digital Elph
rig in San Pablo Bay. My number came up.
8 July, 2003 - This year's 4th of July weekend featured that quintessentially American summertime diversion -- the county fair. In this case it is the fair hosted by Marin County and it was nicely done indeed.
I connected with fair manager Jim Farley through my recent photographs of the Marin Civic Center. He invited me to stop by for the fair and see if I could shoot a few. The winds were generally languid and most of my flying placed the camera over the lake or beyond the periphery of the fair. However, the last day presented a steady breeze that allowed me to walk the camera through the fairgrounds. I have posted a large sample of photographs from the 2003 Marin County Fair using the thumbnail gallery format.
One of the
Riata Ranch Cowboy Girls canters past while standing atop her steed.
24
June, 2003 - Thumbnail Gallery pages posted with some (if I do say so
myself) terrific shots of the Frank
Lloyd Wright designed Marin Civic Center. This building has a newly
refurbished roof and is looking decidedly more handsome these days. A second
gallery organizes a few images of the San
Francisco Lawn Bowling Club hard at play in Golden Gate Park. The club
members had expressed interested in selecting an image to adorn the clubhouse
walls. A third set of images shows the
Conservatory of Flowers as its new glass receives the first whitewash coating.
Finally, I have posted a thumbnail gallery with images of
UC Berkeley's Doe Library and thereabouts
at sunset on the summer solstice.
19 June, 2003 - I seem to be intertaining myself with the Thumbnail Gallery pages and have posted a new one today with recent images of UC Berkeley's central campus area. This is a Campanile-centric set so if you are tired of the tower it is best avoided. The posting organizes a collection of candidate images for a campus publication project.
I am working my way toward responded to a thought-provoking post left by Simon Harbord on the discussion page back in January. Therein, Simon (that great provoker of thoughts) mused about the differences in digital and film based KAP. He confessed that he found digital cameras aloft "quite unsettling, for a host of reasons" and then set about explaining this uneasiness. This is a tough subject and I did not respond at the time. But I am getting closer to having something to say about it.
Finally, I have a new page in the works.
Inspired by young Scott Haefner's
fine results using
Helmut
Dersch's Panotools compositing program I have been working on understanding
this intricate and marvelously useful software package. In my case the software
is being applied to make wide aspect retangular images sort of like the old
school (think George Lawrence). The sample below, the UC Berkeley Campus seen
from above its west entry crescent, was assembled from six digital images shot
two days ago. It looks great when it is big.
12 June, 2003
- I've added another small section called In the
vicinity of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. This collection of images, thumbnail
galleries, and index map provides KAP examples in or near the GGNRA. I have
assembled these pages in support of a proposal to form an ongoing photographic
relationship with the
Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the Nonprofit Partner for the
Golden Gate National Parks. Here's hoping it works out.
8 June, 2003
- I've posted a small section called San
Francisco Bay: Images from the Edge. This collection of images, thumbnail
galleries, and index map provides KAP examples with the Bay's wetlands and
shorelines as subjects. I have assembled these pages in support of a few
inquiries underway regarding future wetlands projects. In particular I am
interested in documenting the
nascent
effort to restore
thousands of acres of salt ponds along the south bay shoreline from Redwood
City to Hayward
7 June, 2003 - Looking back on May 2003 I am delighted to report 18 separate KAP excursions yielding approximately 4,000 images. As it turns out all of these were taken with the new Canon S400 Digital Elph. I am clearly enjoying the novelty of having a higher resolution digital camera rig. And I am generally pretty happy with the results coming out of the S400 / Epson 2200 printer duo.
I've added thumbnail gallery pages for images taken at South Beach Harbor in San Francisco and from an outing yesterday at the Berkeley Civic Center.
From the foreground upward, Berkeley's City
Hall, YMCA, and Main Post Office
3 June, 2003
- Today's thumbnail gallery pages contain images from a couple of afternoons I
spent last week with the Berkeley Fire Department
as they practiced vehicle maneuvers. This was no end of fun. The firemen and
firewomen were as nice as could be and the apparatus fun to watch and
photograph. The highlights of this session methinks are the shots of the
100-ladder extended from the department's new ladder truck. While these turned
out quite interesting I am hankering for another session with better wind and
light.
1 June, 2003 - I've just returned from a lovely camping trip with my UC Berkeley Building Science colleagues on Tomales Bay at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. You can look over aout collective shoulder at the thumbnail page presenting 80 or so images culled from the trip. (Canon S400 Digital Elph).
A quick check of my digital KAP files directories finds that I have taken
just over 4,000 aerial images with the new Canon S400 Digital Elph during the
month of May. I have been generally pleased with the prints that come from this
diminutive 4 megapixel camera. It fit the camera
cradle I built for the S100 Digital Elph without requiring modifications to the
cradle (although I do have to tape the zoom ring in place to prevent the rig
from occasionally zooming out to 3x). It has really been a treat to get out with
the kite this spring.
29 May, 2003 -
I've posted a new thumbnail gallery pages with
images from the Conservatory of Flowers session in Golden Gate Park. My
friend Andrew Blyholder is one of the architects for the restoration of the
Conservatory and I happened to bump into him last week. He mentioned that the
windows of the conservatory were due to be whitewashed soon. This is their
normal state as whitewash is used to moderate solar radiation (as shown in some
of my earlier aerials). Thus motivated I hired myself over to Golden Gate Park
and took these shots while the glazing was remarkably clear.
27 May, 2003 - A month or so ago I had a conversation with Brooks Leffler about stereo images from kite lofted cameras. He mentioned that stereo pairs can often be found in images that were taken without a stereo rig. Two shots in the same direction separated by whatever movement occurred in the camera rig's position can yield a stereo pair. As it turns out this happens quite often with my digital camera rig because I am often taking double shots as insurance against motion blur.
As an example consider the pair of images to the
right. These are two of three shots taken in a four second period. If you have the knack of being able to cross your eyes to view a stereo
pair then take a look at the larger images linked to the pair. You will be
rewarded with a stereo effect that 'pops' quite nicely. The subject is the
flower conservatory in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park as it nears the
completion of a renovation (Canon S400 Digital Elph)
17 May, 2003
- Now that the days are long I have been heading out in the late afternoon to
shoot images of wetlands on the edges of San Francisco Bay. What an
extraordinary pleasure this little project has become. SF Bay is an amazing,
diverse place even in contemporary times and nary an outing goes past without
some new discovery or the stirring of my sense of wonder. The image to the
right, a coastal road in Marin County's China Camp State Park came from
yesterday's outing (it is actually two S400 images joined with Panotools).
I am working up an informal wetlands portfolio as part of a modest campaign to
connect with the foundations, non-profits, and government agencies that serve as
stewards for this coastline. My notion is to develop a longer term longitudinal
project to document wetland conservation/restoration projects. It is a great
time to photograph these projects for several major initiatives like the
South Bay Salt Pond
Restoration Project are underway or just beginning.
10 May 2003 - The Cat's Meow!
A few months back I purchase an Epson 2200 Photo
Stylus printer. This ledger size printer has seven individual ink cartridges
(black, grey, yellow, cyan, light cyan, magenta, and light magenta) and features
an encapsulated mineral pigment ink system that is resistant to fading.
I can report that I have been absolutely delighted with this printer. It has
been easy to live with (no clogs or alignment problems) and from my points
of view the prints have been better than the results I was getting from a custom
lab. I have been using DDI
Software's QImage program to drive the printer and it is a top performer.
I am one happy camper with this set up.
8 May, 2003 -
I have begun to post new images taken with a series of Canon Digital Elph
cameras. The plan is to develop a description of these cameras for the equipment
section (where the camera page woefully needs updating). The pages also
represent the beginning of a new Thumbnail Gallery feature for the site.
Rev up your browsers and point them to the Thumbnail
Gallery index as a point of departure.
10 March 2003 - I am working these days on a low-cost KAP rig carrying a single use camera. The current design is based on a Silly Putty™ timer (thanks to David Hunt's delightful design and excellent write up -- thanks David!). I am working on reducing costs and have the per unit expenses down to $8.00 at this point (including camera, excluding labor for assembling kits). At this writing I have built six or so versions of the cradle (#3 is shown to the left) and have taken six rolls of film using the setup. Cameras flown have included various single-use models and two different point-and-shoot garage sale finds. So far a $4.50 garage sale Vivitar has produced the best images and these are quite nice. The Silly Putty timer is working great as is the double lever shutter release. My next step is "kitting" parts to construct 10 cradles for testing by Exploratorium staff. I will post pages on this soon.
|
An early version of the Exploratorium Low Cost Rig. |
|
21
February 2003 - What a delight it
is to have finished (well almost) the duties of department chair and in doing so
to make a bit more room for matters of pleasure and interest. I have been
working on revisions to this WWW site but none are yet evident. Chalk this up to
a bit of learning curve activity with Cold Fusion and Dreamweaver MX (I think I
am getting somewhere with these). I have designed a new navigation header with
drop down memus and will post a preview example sometime soon. Also in the works
is a revamped discussion page and here I am using restraint (on the advice of
Glenn, David, Carlo, Simon, Peter, and Brooks). The replacement will be simple
in appearance, unencumbered, and simple to use. Better yet, from my perspective,
I will be able to actually manage the content without resorting to exotic and time-consuming
workarounds.
During the last month of so I have begun the first part of
a year long sabbatical leave by becoming an Artist in Residence with the Center
for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) project at San Francisco’s premiere
hands-on science museum, the
Exploratorium. Brooks Leffler has asked me on a couple of occasions what
that actually means. In essence, I get to serve as a free-ranging visitor at the
Exploratorium, engaging in projects as it makes sense to me and to the project
team. This is great fun. For instance, I get to wander through the machine
shops and chat about the exhibits under development. I also have a few longer
term efforts underway. These include a proposal submitted last week for a three-month
gallery exhibit, an effort to develop (yet another) low-cost KAP rig for use
in K-12 curricula (more on this in the near future), and photographically documenting
the geographic context for some of the museum’s activities. The work is split
between the Exploratorium and my basement shop. A state of bliss reigns.
28 December 2002 - When the New Year dawns I will have completed my term as department chair and will return to the normal duties of a professor. This bodes well for kite-related activities in general and this site specifically. Better yet, I am on sabbatical leave for all of 2003. The first six months will be spent as Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium, San Francisco's fine science museum. Also planned is a makeover of this WWW site using Dreamweaver and ColdFusion. Stay tuned for details and have the best of new years.
27 November 2002 - I am delighted to report that the UC Berkeley Department of Architecture, host of this WWW site, migrated to a new server today. The old server was a pitiful looking thing – five years old and prone to breaking down. The new server has plenty of vroooom and a hardware firewall to boot. Let’s hope it keeps the malicious script kiddies at bay.
If you notice any operating problems with the site that might be related to this change in hardware please bring them to my attention. So far the changeover seems to have gone smoothly.
12 November, 2002 - Hail(ed) fellows,
well met -- the assembled KAPiCA group outside our Asilomar meeting room.(John
Leffler, Horizon swing lens panoramic camera, November 2002). A
larger version of this image is now posted as well as a key -- you can't
tell the players without a program. The large version leads in turn to a much
larger version suitable for printing. Our thanks to John and Brooks Leffler for
taking and distributing the photograph.
The KAPiCA report page is now expanded to
include a few conference images and links to other KAPiCA 2002 reports.
17 October 2002 - I am delighted to report that David has rebuilt the server and placed a stronger defensive perimeter around it. We have ordered new server hardware and will soon have redundant capacities. The KAP site is functioning well as I write this with the single exception that the search page still does not work.
10 October 2002 - Here is some unhappy news. During the last two weeks the department’s www site (our generous host) has been beset by evildoers (tm). He/she/they seem to have broken in on several occasions and have used the opportunity to wreak havoc with server permissions. This has caused David, our long-suffering server administrator, to respond by lopping off access permissions for authors (me) and visitors (you). The result is reduced functionality until David gets matters under control.
At this point in time my KAP site is prone to disappear for hours and perhaps days at a time. When the main site is up the pages with database links are prone to disappear (those with .asp extensions). If the asp pages are there the database links they hold are broken. The site’s search feature seems to be broken. Worse of all the Discussion Page behaves as though it is working but will not actually accept posts. Best not to post until I give the all clear here.
Sigh.
3 September 2002 - I returned home from
Burning Man 2002 to discover that the elves at photo.net
had selected one of my images as the Photograph of the Week. I was tickled
pink.
Photo.net is a rather large www site where photographers can post a portfolio of
images for comment by fellow photographers. The site was begun by Philip
Greenspun of Travels with Samantha fame and has been one of my favorite
WWW resources for a while. The image selected for POW was a Canon Digital Elph
plan view of the salt
evaporation pond shoreline in South San Francisco Bay.
7 July, 2002 - Page posted describing the
construction of my new, and frequently used, camera
cradle built around the Canon S100 Digital Elph. Finished in late March
2002, this rig has already taken over 4,000 aerial images. The mind swims.
2 July, 2002 - Signs of life at the old WWW site. I have picked up the Burning Man pages again and am making an earnest run at finishing them up (before this year's Burning Man!) While Burning Man was a great experience last year -- photographically and otherwise -- it somehow got linked emotionally to the 9/11 mess that followed it. I found it difficult to get the project finished up. Time heals, I am back on it. It feels fine. So, here are pages addressing the last day of the effigy, bicycles at Burning Man. and the Burning Man Kite Aerial Photography Portrait Series.
29 June, 2002 - This week I responded to a photograph editor's inquiry about aerials I took at the Real Goods Solar Living Center in 1998 (film money!) The editor found me through the project's architect. On reflection I realized that I had scanned these images for inclusion in a gallery page over four years ago but have yet to post the page. It would have been impossible for the editor to discover the images through this WWW site. The products of many, many KAP sessions languish in a similar state of purgatory. Since I tend to use the site as an image organizing tool, their absence causes me to lose track of them too.
So, as a reminder to get working on the gallery pages, as a step toward organizing 'lost' images, as a tangible indicator that I have continued to photograph during my chairmanship, I offer to you the Queue Page, a reverse chronological accounting of KAP sessions that have yet to be published on this site. I am working backwards in time and have just completed May 2002.
The precipitating image from my Real Goods
session
28 June, 2002 - Now hear this.
Our reconstruction of the WWW server is (I am told) largely complete and reestablishing the database links has returned my ASP pages to life (e.g., What’s New). Why don’t you celebrate by visiting the Voice of the Viewer page (http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/database/Favorites/Favorite_list_desc.asp) and nominating a favorite image or two. The missing posts from the discussion page have gone missing again. I will repost them when time allows but in the meantime it should be a stable environment for new posts.
BTW, the site search feature is still down and should return soon. Sorry about the hiccups.
That is all.
Gratuitous image of an Emeryville, California fuel dock
27 June, 2002 - Worthy of note are three newly inaugurated KAP WWW sites. The first is by Brooks Leffler, dean of US KAPers. Brooks has revved up his Macintosh to assemble a clean, direct site that follows the web maxim of content, content, content. Among the first posts are nice diagrams for assembling a DC-to-DC voltage converter for the affordable X10 video transmitter and photographs of various Leffler-constructed rigs (http://homepage.mac.com/kyteman/Menu2.html).
Christian Becot of Cherbourg, France, another longtime KAPer and Harbordesque non-linear thinker, has joined the ranks of KAP webmasters with a new site from France. I always learn interesting stuff from Christian (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/becot/)
Finally, there is a fine new site from KAP neophyte Scott Haefner on the San Francisco peninsula. While looking at KAP for use by the US Geological Survey, Scott was bitten by the bug. In a brief period he has assembled some ground-breaking equipment and produced some very interesting images (http://thehaefners.com/kap/). I am most impressed.
15 May, 2002 - The
KAP WWW site has been flaky of late and downright unavailable for the last week.
We are basically freeloading on the WWW Server for the Department of
Architecture at UC Berkeley. Our main architecture building is three years into a 33-
million-dollar seismic retrofit project and we are now moving our departmental servers from one side of the building (and very old network infrastructure) to the newly refurbished side (with new 100 Mb ether). Something in the move caused our WWW server to become unstable with the result of periodic crashes. This caused occasional outages of the KAP site last week and lack of access to other really pressing instructional sites on our server.
Our network administrator had reason to believe that my KAP site had corrupted files of some sort and that it was responsible for server instability. He took the site down last Thursday while he continued to work on a permanent remedy. I can report now that the KAP site is back up today. But, we haven't really solved the problem -- it may be touch an go for a few more days.
I confess that our entire server system is something of a chewing gum and paper clip affair -- were that we had a proper budget.
In any event, we will sort things out. Patience is counseled.
30
April, 2002 - While undergoing the throes of semester's end I have been
escaping
a bit to fly the kite. Lovely pastime kites. And I've been getting the
occasional camera loft too. Lately I have been flying a camera rig built around
the tiny Canon S100 Digital Elph. This solid (230g!) camera has a 2 megapixel
array and takes around 200 images per battery charge when the display is turned
off. It also features a menu setting that allows one to disable the automatic
timeout that turns the camera off to save power during periods without
use.
Now I am wondering why it took me so long to fly a digital camera. Beyond its capacity to store six rolls of images on a 128 mB compact flash card, I enjoy the rapid feedback of the digital rig and the savings on film development costs are most welcome. I find it handy in many ways to have the images captured in a digital format. Just a little tuning in my image editor (typically resize, sharpen and equalize) then off they go in e-mails, word processed documents, and WWW pages.
Truth me known I do know why I waited so long.
It was due to concerns about resolution and color saturation. I was afraid that
I would capture a great shot and it would be trapped in a low-res format. The
cameras have been steadily improving and the new models are better every year
(my flying Elph is old tech at two years and two megapixels). So I am now
planning a rig around a five megapixel camera and we will see what that
puppy can do.
17 April, 2002 - My KAP Rig #4 is
relatively complete and has taken its first aerial photographs. This rig is
built around the very pleasant Canon Digital Elph (original S100 version). I
have used the camera for two years now and
taken around 6,500 digital images with it. The rig follows my usual basswood and
aluminum angle stock construction (I haven't scored a CNC milling machine quite yet). First
flight was down at La Jolla, California during a trip with young
Charlie Benton to check out the engineering program at the University of
California at San Diego.
Splendor in the grass -- the newly built
digital camera rig resting on the fine lawn at La Jolla.
28 March, 2002 - Inspired by the recent thread regarding
stitched panoramas on the KAP Discussion page I have been playing with
PhotoVista and some recent shots from the campus. The example above is a quick
stitching of four shots sweeping from south to north across the Berkeley Campus.
The top of Sather Tower in in the lower center. Two of the three seam lines are
pretty apparent (Canon 24-mm, March 2002).
14 February, 2002 -
I found a bit more time to work on an
interface for the KAP Discussion Page archive and things are turning out ok.
The new interface allows you to search the 1,800 message archive by Who (the
person who posted), Topic (the title of the post, and Comment (the contents of
the post.)
The search criteria are joined by Boolean ANDs, search terms are found as substrings, and the search terms are case insensitive. Thus a search for Who=cris finds a four-page-long list of posts by Cris, Cris Benton, cris, and crisp@socrates.berkeley.edu. If you add Title=update it will narrow the search to the three messages from me with “update” in the title. Adding Comment=matters yields the one message that had the word “matters” in the body of the posting.
Plenty left to do: work out a way to sort the results in both ways on any column, find a way to present the messages in threads, replace the [paragraph] markers in the text with actual paragraph shifts, provide a means for sorting by year, and on and on. Also need to go into the database and work on some data quality issues – toss the off-topic posts, clean up some fields, etc.At least for now you have access to the older messages.
In the future Notes on Kite Aerial Photography will have two sections supporting discussion. The original discussion group page will continue as before. There you can see the most recent posts by thread and can add your own comments. This area will have a shorter Table of Contents and should load more quickly. Periodically I will move copies of the posts on the active discussion page to the KAP Discussion Archive. Here the posts will be static – no opportunities to directly reply – but you will be able to search a large body of posts by the fields described above.
All for now.
10 February, 2002 - In 1997 I started a discussion page for the visitors to my KAP site and this proved an endearing if not enduring feature. The Discussion Page, responsible for about 1/3 of my site's traffic, was created using Microsoft FrontPage's Discussion Page Wizard. All in all this worked quite well until something became corrupted. Regrettably, Microsoft provides no tools for maintaining their discussion page feature -- no means for archiving, trimming, or rebuilding the threads that serve a discussion group.
In February 2002, after five years of operation, the Table of Contents for my discussion page became corrupted. This left me with 1,800 posts lacking a relationship with one another or a way to make themselves apparent to this site's visitors. As a first step to restoring access I have imported the content of the 1,800 posts into MS Access and developed a quick database results interface within FrontPage. Next steps will include the ability to search by topic, date or author. In the meantime, you can still post new threads to the discussion page and I encourage you to do so. I will not lose them.
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4 December, 2001 - While gathering stats regarding traffic on the department's WWW server we ran a separate report on the KAP site using OpenWebScope. During the last year this site has had over 200,000 "unique visitors" according to the program and well over a million pages served. Pulling out the old slide rule and assuming 200 pages of paper per inch and and two pages of paper per www page yields an equivalent stack of paper over 1,000 feet high. We have saved a tree.
Each day sees about 600 new visitors and 150 or so returning visitors with traffic requiring about 1 Gb of transfers a day. About a third of the traffic is for the discussion pages.
24 November, 2001 - Brooks Leffler issues
the complete aerial eye, a compendium of 18 issues of the aerial eye in PDF format on CD-ROM.
Historians (albeit specialized) will surely look at the 1990s as a milestone
decade in the development of kite aerial photography. And its shining jewel was the quarterly publication
the aerial eye. Editor Brooks Leffler
inaugurated this fine resource and then nurtured its development into a
first-rate resource for ideas related to KAP equipment, techniques, and culture.
In doing so he fostered a sense of community among KAPers that persists to this
day. He has now extended this class act through the creation of an easily
accessible, inexpensive archive version of the Aerial Eye. This is a must have
for those contemplating cameras aloft.
Brooks rules!
He is offering the new disk (in sleeve) at
$25.00 until the first of the year, less the promised $10.00 discount for those
who invested in the earlier CD containing only the last 8 issues. After the
first of the year, the CD will be available for
$30.00. You can contact Brooks at kyteman@redshift.com.
23 November, 2001 - My the time it does fly. I have continued to play around with the Viewer's Favorite KAP Images feature of the site and it seems to be shaping up. The database work is fun and I am learning some useful stuff. I would be most thankful if you would visit the nominating page to add a favorite image of yours.
The detailed pages specific to each
nomination (reached by clicking on the
symbol in the roster page) now allow others to leave their
comments regarding the image as well. I am also starting a system to include
thumbnail images on the detailed pages (with photographer's permission). So far,
the only thumbnails present are for my images.
Continued the Burning Man 2001
postings with a pages three and four covering art installations. Page three
includes images of the 3D Maze and the Mausoleum
while page four provides a regrettably sparse coverage of art
cars and a few miscellaneous playa installations. A page on the Man is next,
then some bicycle shots, then people.
21 October, 2001 - One of my seminars has me playing around with web-based forms linked to database files. Now I am no Peter Bults (Peter built an impressive site that is driven entirely by database links) but it has been fun playing around with the technique. So this weekend I put together a quick set of pages to allow this site's visitors to nomination their favorite KAP images to a list of favorites. The entire list is then retrievable by those who roam through along with links to the sites where the images reside. I figure it is a good way to get a bit more going in my Others section. Take a look and nominate an image or two. The section now consists of a nomination form, a list summary of nominees (I have provide some 'starter dough') and a page with more detailed results.
I am off to Hong Kong at the end of the week and
will get back to posting Burning Man photographs when I return. Sadly, this
will be the first trip in several years during which I will not carry a bag of
KAP gear. It is just to soon after the mess on the East Coast and I am wary of traveling
with the eclectic accoutrements of KAP.
10 October, 2001 - Continued Burning Man 2001
postings with a page describing my life on the
playa and the beginnings of my next Burning Man section -- images
of art installations on the playa. There
are four pages worth of these and I have finished
number two as well.
29 September, 2001 - Burning Man 2001
postings continue with coverage of Black
Rock City's Center Camp and my local hangout - the Department of Tethered
Aviation and some of the art installations
that graced the inner playa.
20 September, 2001 - It has been a long, fine summer and I am now back in school. Having hardly gotten a kite aloft during the last academic year I am delighted to report that I was able to shoot around 45 rolls of film over the summer with major efforts mounted in England and at the Burning Man gathering in Nevada.
I work now on posting some images from Burning Man and the first page to emerge provides an introduction to the trip and a menu for subsequent Burning Man pages. This is followed by a page describing Black Rock City and offering a few musings regarding dust.
3 June, 2001 - Finished up the gallery pages covering the Royal Abbey at Fontevraud with a page conveying images of the abbey's cloitre, another page with shots of the church's spires and towers, and a final page featuring the refectory and kitchens.
The Europe 2000 series continues with a page of images from St. Malo in Brittany.
1 June, 2001 - Work on posting images from Europe continues with a new gallery page containing a few salvaged images from the Lustgarten in Berlin and images of the Chateau at Villandry and its gardens.
I have also posted the first of four pages covering the village of Fontevraud, France and the Royal Abbey it contains.
Fontevraud, France
24 May, 2001 - I have posted three more gallery pages covering the small French town of Chinon as photographed on a late afternoon last summer. The second page includes aerial fisheye images among other shots while the third has the vineyards just north of Chinon right around sunset.
Also new is a gallery page with images taken at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin.and another page emphasizing the formal gardens and immediate surroundings of the castle.
My one photo session in Paris yielded images from the Parc de la Villette.
I also added photos and quick descriptions of two new framed kites, a DOPERO made by Brooks Leffler and a Double ParaSled made by David Wagner, to the framed kite page.
20 May, 2001 - Work
on posting images from Europe continues with new gallery pages covering the confluence
of the Vienne and Loire rivers as well as the
nearby village of St. Martin. These are followed by images from a
sunflower field adjacent to the Chateau d'Ussy.
17 May, 2001 - In this season of longer
days and longer theses I have found time to start posting last summer's
images from a trip to Europe. I begin with a gallery
page that will serve as a table of contents for the Europe trip.
2 May, 2001 - Posted new gallery pages
containing images taken of the 1928 Albert Kahn
Ford Assembly Building in Richmond, California and photographs of a sculpture
made of shopping carts found on the Albany, California waterfront.
1 May, 2001 - The coming weekend, specifically Sunday May 6, marks the opening of the Presidio's restored Crissy Field. The celebration will include an 11:30 am airshow with vintage planes (Crissy field was once a US Army airport.) This is followed by a "kite flying festival" featuring invited guests. Scheduled to appear are:
The Japanese Kite Association - Shirone Team
The Philippines Kite Association - Orlando Ongkingco
The Indonesian Kite Association - Tinton
Malcolm Goodman - U.K. European Air Gallery
Michel Gressier - France
Pierre Fabre - France
Claudio Capelli - Italy
Peter Lynn - New Zealand
Robert Trapenier - Canada
Tal Streeter - N.Y.
George Peters - Colorado
Bay Area Sundowner - San Francisco
Randy Tom - L.A
Not too shabby. The
program set a time for 1 pm and promises "acrobatic
kite performances, kite decorating, an international kite exhibition, and kite
flying will highlight this festival of flying art, as many cultures come
together to ride Crissy's windy currents. Bring a kite!" Sounds like
fun. I have been asked to serve as aerial photographer.
23 April, 2001 - After several months of
meaning to I have finally added Peter
Bults' new Digital Encyclopedia of Kite Aerial Photography to the links list
proffered by this site (nice site Peter!). I also took a moment to fix a few
things on the Bay Area Winds page.
17 March, 2001 - I regret that there has not been much new of late! My fears that the role of department chair would be immersive were understated at best. On the positive side, the job is both fun and challenging - and thankfully finite in duration. The down side is that I have flown kites but once since last October and this What's New page is testament to my neglect of the KAP site.
I have also taken a bit of a side trip into coffee of all things. Chez Benton is now cluttered with vacuum coffee pots, home roasting equipment, and a new Rancilio Miss Silvia espresso machine with companion Rocky grinder. Great fun (though I am staying up pretty late as a result.) Blame the fine WWW site of Mark Prince for this side trip.
I've promised myself to try to get the KAP site moving along again. One of my problems was that work was on this site is done at home. And work on the old home computer -- now four years old -- has seemed slower and slower. As of 20 minutes ago I have upgraded my old 33K modem connection to DSL and the new world seems pretty zippy. With luck this will lead me back to working on the KAP site during the late hours which in turn will lead to more kite flying. We will see.
14 August, 2000 - Oh Happy Days! The KAP WWW Site Discussion Group is back up. System Administrator David Virgo was able to restore operation with a minimum of fuss. His new baby is doing very well. Please use this as an excuse to leave a message or two. I am particularly interested in hearing how FLiBB 2000 went in Germany and whether anyone has flown the digital Elph yet.
On another topic, I took a day this last weekend and organized by KAP negatives. Looks like I am up to around 430 rolls shot to date. I keep the negatives organized chronologically in notebooks and maintain a database to help me find a particular negative. Having a quantitative bent I decided to graph the time dimensions of this database to see if a pattern emerged -- results posted below.
A
graph from MS Excel showing my patterns of KAP shooting. This is a plot of month
vs. year for the five years I have been taking aerial photographs. For each
month the number of rolls taken is depicted by column height (the image is
linked to a larger version of the
graph). This confirms, for me at least, that summertime is KAP time.
8 August, 2000 - I am going to work during the next couple of months to catch up on my gallery pages. There is much to post. Let's begin with two gallery pages showing images of the Hearst Mining Building seismic retrofit project on the UC Berkeley campus. A second pair of pages contains images from the German Longues Battery on the Normandy Coast. This battery formed part of the Atlantik Wall defense line until it was captured just after D-Day.
8 August, 2000 - I am back from Europe and settling into the Fall Semester. While in Europe I noted with regret that the site went down. Turns out we were hacked by some unsavory sort of person and the system administrator moved the site to another machine. In the process the KAP Discussion Group disappeared. As many of you have noticed it has not come back. This is in part due to the joyful arrival of our system administrator's first child. When he returns I will press forward on restoring the discussion group.
13 June, 2000 - Drat, the pace of work at work has picked up considerably as I prepare for a a month in Europe beginning July 3. Part of the Europe trip will be taking aerial photographs of Chinon, France. This area of the Loire Valley between Maine and Sully-sur-Maine has been nominated for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a cultural landscape. I will participate in a workshop to document some of its features -- sounds like hardship duty!
With greatest regret I must miss Kite-Aerial-Photography-Days in Bad Bevensen, Germany (FLiBB 2000). the calendar conspired to mandate my return from Europe just as this event begins. Drat again.
On a more prosaic note I have posted new gallery pages with images of Wurster Hall undergoing seismic strengthening on the UC Berkeley campus.
4 June, 2000 - I've put together three
gallery pages with images and a brief narrative about an abandoned
Depression-era factory building on the south shoreline of Richmond, California.
The first page describes the industrial context of
Richmond, the second praises the qualities of
this industrial building, and the third describes the
building in more detail. All pages are illustrated with aerial images of
this photogenic structure.
1 June, 2000 - I was able to get a kite up a couple of times to photograph an abandoned factory I have long admired in the Port of Richmond -- look for photographs from this session in the near future. In the meantime, take a look at new gallery pages featuring Fort Point in San Francisco, Wellman Hall on the UC Berkeley campus and its neighbor the Valley Life Sciences Building.
23 May, 2000 - Added a couple of new gallery pages with views from the top of San Francisco's Mt. Davidson and one of its surrounding neighborhoods
22 May, 2000 - I have been playing around with the reporting feature of FrontPage and can offer the following trivia concerning the Notes on Kite Aerial Photography WWW Site (excluding the discussion section.)
Number of WWW pages in site | 268 | |
Number of images in site | 2027 | |
Size of site in MB | 146 | |
Internal hyperlinks in site | 8185 | |
External hyperlinks in site | 269 |
21 May, 2000 - I have been tidying up these KAP pages here and there -- not unlike beginning work again on a garden after a period of neglect. As part of the effort I have been searching the WWW for matters KAP. I am struck by how much information is now on the WWW regarding our collective pursuit of aerial images. It is an almost stunning testament to that happy blend of genius and generosity that marks the contributors. From the many dozens of KAP sites out there (David Hunt's list contains over 70 at this writing) four emerge as particularly special to me. I encourage you to visit them. In no particular order they are:
Simon Harbord's Kite Aerial Photography site -- Simon has one of those free-roaming, high-energy minds that causes me to think of Buckminster Fuller (a fan of Alexander Graham Bell's Octahedral/Tetrahedral kites.) Visiting Simon's site invariably causes me to begin doodling on whatever is handy (today's graduation program) and immediately long for some uninterrupted hours in my workshop.
David Hunt's KAPER site -- I feel like David bravely stepped in to fill a void created by the demise of the aerial eye and my own site's hiatus. It is a lively site with a growing body of information.
Alberto Bonati, Andrea Casalboni, Marcello Caselli, and Claudio Del Greco's Kite Aerial Photography site - This Italian site has a wealth of information regarding rig construction and KAP history.
James Aber's Great Plains KAP site -- Prof. Aber chronicles an ongoing engagement of KAP techniques in the service of instruction and research.
17 May, 2000 - American Southwest week
continues with the posting of images from pueblo bonito in the remarkable Chaco
Canyon. The first pueblo bonito page provides an
introduction to Chaco Canyon, the second features
images from the adjoining bluff, and the third
introduces Threatening Rock.
15 May, 2000 - It is an interesting indicator of lag on this WWW site that I have just posted images from a trip to Bryce Canyon almost two years ago. Better late than never I guess. take a look at the introductory page to the Bryce Canyon trip (in which I document a KAP mishap), a page with images of the abstract Bryce Canyon landscape, and a page with images of hoodoos.
11 May, 2000 - I have finally updated the Bay Area Wind Reports page which now features a live link to the latest plot of Bay Area winds thanks to the folks at U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park.
I have also added a gallery page showing Charlie Benton skim boarding and two pages with shots of the newly-refurbished Edwards Track Stadium at UC Berkeley. The second of these pages has a cautionary story regarding automatic focus.
8 May, 2000 - An unusual spate of late Spring rain kept me cooped up this Sunday. What better to do than post a gallery pages with images from a late day KAP session on Bolinas Ridge and midday images from Drake's Beach at Pt. Reyes.
4 May, 2000 - Filled with the optimism of spring I've promised myself that I will spend a few minutes on this site each day. In today's effort I finally synchronized the header links for the kap and discussion sections of the site (been meaning to do that for two years.) I also added a link to David Hunt's fine KAPER WWW page to my KAP link page.
3 May, 2000 - Well, here I am rumbling back to apparent life as I begin to post on this long neglected KAP site. As feared earlier, my service as chair of the Department of Architecture has turned out to be an immersive experience -- entertaining in many ways but also very demanding of time. To my great chagrin I went through a three-month period in which I did not fly a kite much less take an aerial image. Yikes. Happily, I am making a greater effort to get a kite aloft these days and have shot a dozen rolls over the last few weeks. It feels good.
I have pledged to myself that I will try to get this site rolling again. We will see. For starters I have finished posting my first page with images of Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley.
31 October, 1999 -
I'm afraid I have not had much time for this
WWW site of late but I have been out a few times with the kite. The most
interesting of these was in early October during a trip to Indonesia. Last
Spring I agreed to travel to Jakarta to review the architecture program at the
University of Indonesia. As the trip approached I wrote Anshori Djausal a KAPer
in Bandar Lampung on the island of Sumatra. I had known of Anshori through his
WWW pages and a mutual acquaintance, Wolfgang Bieck, who visited Indonesia
earlier.
The photograph shows Son of Krakatau, an emerging volcanic island in the caldera
left by the 1883 explosion of Krakatau. The peak in the distance is at the edge
of the caldera. Anshori was a most gracious host and arranged this trip on his
diving club's boat. Details to follow if I can find some time. (32K jpg, Canon 24-mm,
October 1999).
26 October, 1999 - In 1999, I received a communication from Steve Kaluf, Technical Director of the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), expressing concern that kite aerial photographers might be using frequencies assigned to model aircraft. The full text of Steve's letter(s) can be found in the KAP Discussion Pages. Now that this concern has been raised, the most prudent course in the USA would be to use the 27Mhz channels per AMA's recommendations. You can find further discussion on the KAP Safety Page.
18 October, 1999 - Lately I have been fielding requests from
folks who are interested in Canoma, a program from MetaCreations that builds
three-dimensional computer models from photographs. Like my earlier Campanile
Project with Paul Debevec Canoma can benefit greatly from kite aerial
photography. The inclusion of views taken from a modest height allows a
fly-through engagement of the resulting model instead of just a walk through.
Several people have gone ahead with Canoma models using images found on this
site and that is fine with me. A case in point is Chris Casady and his Canoma
model of Pierce Ranch at Pt.
Reyes. Chris was kind enough to request permission to use the images I'd posted
on this site (I expect no less). After exchanging a couple of e-mails I offered
to go back out to Pierce Ranch and take a more complete set including
ground-level images. If there is interest out there I could post the entire set
for others playing with Canoma. (32K jpg left and 40K jpg right, Canon 24-mm,
August 1999).
12 August, 1999 - Just posted a couple of gallery pages with images taken a during summer a year ago -- Goldsmith Seeds #1 and Goldsmith Seeds #2.
Search is working again.
6 August, 1999 - I've been staying pretty busy with work stuff and happily part of that is developing a new WWW site for my department. We have been working in the MS FrontPage 2000 environment and installed the FP 2000 server extensions today. If you are reading this then it worked. I noticed this morning that the search feature was down (sigh.) I will look into it. Search is working again.
12 July, 1999 - I took a bit of Sunday afternoon time and updated my links to other KAP WWW sites. When I began this site there was one existing WWW page on kite aerial photography. There are now almost 1,000 pages available with 260 pages of material on this site alone (excluding the discussion page). Take a browse through my links, you will find some fun pages out there.
7 July, 1999 - With sadness I report the demise of the aerial eye, kite aerial photography's preeminent quarterly. The Summer 1999 issue arrived a couple of days ago bearing the news that publication would lapse. Back issues will be available for a limited time.
I would like to offer my most heartfelt thanks to the aerial eye's principal editor and author Brooks Leffler for his stewardship of the journal, a demanding job by any measure and one that Brooks assumed voluntarily. Brooks brought to this task a fine sense of composition, an effective editor's eye, and very high standards. It was a joy to watch. Thanks too to the many contributors over the five years of publication. I learned much from this enterprise and will miss it. The aerial eye is dead, long live the aerial eye.
5 July, 1999 - I've finished the remaining gallery pages from Oahu by posting sample images of Richard Sterman's vacation rentals and a few miscellaneous shots near Shark's Cove. I've also posted a single gallery page of photographs taken in Guatemala during May.
I spent a couple of hours tracking down old links that were broken. Looks like another couple of hours worth to do. Patience is advised. I also repaired (yet again) the site's search feature so search away while it is working.
30 June, 1999 - The gallery pages with images from Hawaii continue. New today are Oahu Surf #2 and Old Town Haleiwa. There will be two more pages from Hawaii following this then I can turn to Guatemala.
28 June, 1999 - Well, I am finally at work posting new gallery pages. Tonight's batch includes pages with images taken in Arizona's Canyon de Chelly and along the North Shore of Oahu. The Canyon de Chelly images date from a trip last summer (how has a year gone by?) and include ground- and kite-based photos (Canyon de Chelly #1, Canyon de Chelly #2). The first Oahu page provides an introduction to our trip while the second features plan shots of tropical surf.
7 June, 1999 - "School is out for summer." A. Cooper. The interminable Spring Semester has finally come to an end and I am spending the first portion of the summer traveling. I just returned from a trip to Guatemala where I made several presentations at the Universidad de Francisco Marroquin including a lecture on KAP. Though the trip was quite busy I did take a midday roll of KAP images outside Antigua at the village of Ciudad Vieja -- a process that involved a very high perspiration to photograph ratio. I can report no problems in flying the equipment down and back as hand luggage. At one point Guatemalan authorities conducted an extensive search of my briefcase but didn't even look at the KAP cargo bag.
I am off now to the North Shore of Oahu to take a few images for a local realtor and to chill out a bit. More later.
30 April, 1999 - I'm approaching the end of another busy semester and regrettably there has been little time for matters KAP of late. On a relatively positive note I have been elected to serve as Chair of my academic department for the next three years. While this position promises to offer no end of entertaining challenges it is also making time demands that bode poorly for an active thread of KAP work. Perhaps after my metamorphosis into an administrator I will reemerge.
18 March, 1999 - I fixed the link pointing to my home page. It has been an interesting month. The ZDTV television story was finally released and several print publications made reference to the WWW site. This has increased the traffic substantially.
10 March, 1999 - From time to time I am approached by an academic colleague with the idea that kite aerial photography (KAP) would be of assistance in their work. I am quite interested in these applied dimensions of KAP and would like to help where I can. Often the colleague is developing a research proposal and would like to know "what equipment should I specify for applying KAP in project X?" The answer, of course, depends on a myriad of factors including specifics of the application (e.g., descriptive, quantitative, critical, ancillary), site conditions (expected wind, site obstructions), budget, and so on. In any event I have posted a roster of the equipment I use with approximate prices and my sources. Should make decent fodder for research proposal development.
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