Notes on Kite Aerial Photography: Others
A note from Benton: In October 1996, I started a correspondence with Jan van der Elsen, a colleague of Simon Harbord and an aspiring kite aerial photographer. Jan had come across the pages of this WWW site and wrote the occasional notes seeking advice and offering comments. One of the joys of this site is to find that it has encouraged others to build and fly a KAP rig. There are perhaps a couple of dozen cases of this of which I am aware. Jan has certainly done this and more with the guidance of the inventive Simon Harbord. Here is the well-written and illustrated tale of Jan's KAP beginnings from the hand of van der Elsen himself:
Here's
a picture of myself, flying my Parafoil kite for the second time.
During the first months, I didn't fly my camera rig yet (it
simply wasn't finished!) but it gained me a lot of experience
with the kite. Something to be recommended for people taking up
this hobby. Crashing your kite in a steep diving mode is
certainly spectacular but believe me, I would not like to think
of the results with the camera on it... I now feel 100%
comfortable with the kite, a great performer with lots of lift.
(25K jpg)
With a name like mine, you must have figured out that I am not a native of the beautiful country of Scotland. I've worked for a major oil company for about 14 years now and moved over from the Netherlands 3.5 years ago. I now live in a very rural area about 25 miles North of Aberdeen in a 110 year old farm-house. A perfect location for KAP activities as I was about to find out..
During the second half
of 1996, I was infected with the KAP virus, after spending some
lunch breaks with my colleague and good friend Simon Harbord. He
took me out to show how pictures from the air where taken with
one of his rigs. After he let me take a few shots, and when I
looked at the results afterwards, I knew I was seriously
infected... KAP brought together a few hobbies I used to be doing
like electronics, fine mechanical construction, photography and
the joy of feeling "free", letting a kite fly way up in
the air.
First thing to do was buying a proper kite. I took Simon’s advice and bought a 17 sq. ft. parafoil kite and about 1000 ft. dracon 200# line. That was the start of a hobby, I now enjoy a lot. It didn't took long to go through the whole range of experiences while handling a kite like that, including burning my fingers (despite the warnings..), being VERY afraid I would loose the kite all together, just catching the reel between my legs.. All this off course without having a camera rig connected to the line!
Picture of my rig. As you can see, the design is
rather similar to the ones you find on various places on the Web.
(26K jpg)
During the month of October, I started the construction of the camera rig, based on the drawings and pictures on Cris Benton's web-side (Brooks Leffler's BBBB IV design , ed.). After I bought a second hand Yashica T4 there was no stopping me. Although, construction was delayed during November and December due to the death of a good friend of ours in the Netherlands. Anyway, the rig was completed early January 1997. By that time, I had lots of tips from Simon incorporated in the design and he taught me how to fly the kite so that at that time I was ready to fly the rig, with enough confidence not to crash the lot during the first flight.
Some details on my first
KAP rig: The camera is protected by means of the aluminum strip
at the bottom. This was done to prevent the camera from getting
damaged when it is retrieved. I have also made a switch, moved by
the camera triggering servo that enables me to switch-off the
receiver (and more importantly the power to the servo's). This is
purely a safety device that protects the servo-gears when the rig
has a "rough" landing, enabling the servos to turn
freely. Obviously you need to be careful not to trigger this
switch while it is still up in the air: there is no way to switch
it back on again rather than doing in manually once the rig is
down! Another safety device is the main gear on top of the rig:
the small wheel has a build-in slip, again in order to save the
servo gear just in case... The bamboo stick is acting as antenna
and pointer but I am looking into changing this since it is not
handy for transport reasons. I am working on a construction based
on a simple antenna from a portable radio, that you can simply
pull-out when needed and push-in when finished. Those are the
nice things about KAP: you always seem to improve bits and
pieces, I love it. The picavet suspension system is connected to
the kite-line my means of two garden-hose pieces, sliding over
the stick and securing the rig. This system (thanks again to
Simon) proved to very handy since it is easy to connect /
disconnect and doesn't damage the line. The little mechano piece
in the middle of the stick is again another safety-device: should
the garden-hoses become loose (very unlikely indeed), the rig
will slide down on the line. Although I never tried it (and I
hope it never will) it must be coming down with a tremendous
speed! But at least it's down safely.
By now I have shot around 10 rolls of film, on various locations within a 25 miles zone around where I live. The most successful and dramatic pictures are the ones at Slains Castle, a ruin sitting on a cliff. (see pictures on next page)
I tend to like the low-altitude pictures (100-200ft) and believe that is where the power of KAP sits: every year people knock on our door, trying to sell us pictures (for mega-bucks!) of our home, taken from a small aircraft from at least 500 ft up (their lower limit). I can't wait until the next guy comes up: I will show him some of my own pictures...
(19-Jan-97) Pictures of my home from different
altitudes and directions. (You can see me and my wife Agnes on
the left of the first picture) This was my first roll of film and
was very pleased with the results. The camera (Yashica T4)
performs very well indeed with high speed film. This first
session was to find out what height was ideal for these kind of
pictures. Since there wasn't a lot of wind, the kite was up about
700 ft with the camera between 90 and 120 ft. What a thrill...the
first flight, I'll never forget it. (32K jpg left, 40K jpg
lower left and 35K jpg lower right)
So far so good, I have only had one rough landing, my wife turned out to be an excellent co-pilot although she is getting very nervous when the kite and rig are way above the sea and cliffs. No complains about the weather yet. The only thing I am considering is buying another kite for low-wind days. I know, sounds strange for flying in Scotland but I have had more days with insufficient wind than days I couldn't fly because of gales! I am focusing my efforts onto castles (plenty around here) and old houses to capture the typical Scottish countryside. I will keep on sending you pictures! Simon deserves a lot of credit for all the help he offered, he even made me two tails for different weather conditions. We now bouncing of synergetic ideas for improvements to our rigs and planning KAP outings to various places.
One thing left to do for the short term: taping the answers to the famous questions "What is that hanging under your kite", "how do you know where it's aiming at" and "So how do you control your KITE with this remote.." on a small tape-recorder. Already I must have answered this a 100 times!
The next page contains more samples of Jan's early KAP work.
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Comments to author: crisp@socrates.berkeley.edu . All content,
graphics and
images contained throughout are Copyright (C) 1995 - 2005 by Charles C. Benton
and are protected by United States and International copyright laws.
No text, graphic or image may be used whole or in part, individually,
or as part of a derivative work without express written permission.
Source materials copyright
(C) 1997 by Jan van der Elsen
All rights reserved. Revised: Monday, August 02, 1999
URL: http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/~cris/kap/others/vdelsen1.html