Kite Aerial Photography

Hi,

many have asked us about the "How?" of using a kite while sailing to get some pictures of your boat.
First, you need the willingness to loose all the money you invest in it. The chances are there that the wind dies down once your equipment is 100m up in the air it will just be ditched in the water.
Not willing to accept that? Then don´t do it!

Otherwise you need a kite next. I use a Sutton flowform single line kite for that. You also need a bracket to fix the camera to. This usually has a pivacet system installed. This contains 4 smal pulleys and a piece of rope and is a masterpiece of efficiency. It makes sure that the angle of the camera is kept independent of the angle the line has.

As a digital camera take a cheap one with wide angle lens and important: An integrated intervall timer! This you can set to 5 seconds and then the camera will click a snap every 5 seconds. With a 8GB SD card this gives you plenty of pictures and maybe 1% is good :-)

I use a Ricoh Caplio 6 with 7MP. The setting of the camera should be spot metering and spot focus. With auto focus it will always focus the line and you will have nice shots of the line but not the boat.

Speaking about the line, we use a 2,5mm braided line. If you use transparent fishing line you see it less but handling the monofilament fishing line is a nightmare.

Use a day with good light and steady windspeed and direction. Then put the autopilot on the windvane.

Let the kite up until at least 10m above the boat so it is in laminar winds not disturbed by you boat.
Only THEN you attach the camera to the kite line and let more line out until the camera has reached the distance you want. It might be well around 100m of line in total.

You can let it fly for 10-30Minutes and then you haul it back in.
Take the camera off first and check the pictures on the PC. If you are happy then get the kite in.
If conditions are good you can keep the kite up for hours without touching the line.
But it on a cleat or a winch and make sure it is not chafing.


Thats all!
It gives you an unusual persepctive of you boat and you would have to invests much more into a helicopter coming out for you :-)


Try to let the kite fly from different corners of you boat at different daylight, waves and windspeeds and angles. You will be amazed by the pictures you get.

Come on, you have nothing to do on long passages anyway! IT´S FUN!