Mitchell Sports Photography

Kite Aerial Photography

First I'd like to walk through the progression on rigs. Here is the very first rig, all manual with disposable film camera, extremely lightweight. After everything is attached to the kite line you wind the timer release, cock the trigger, make sure the film in the disposable camera has been wound, set your angle of desired target, start timer and release kite (it's already been tied off securely).

So now you count the two minutes that the timer releases to, walk the kite line down, and repeat the "reset" procedure, obviously this takes considerable time and energy walking the kite down every time to advance the film and reset the timer. But it was an excellent start and sure fueled the fire in me to improve the rig. Also shown is my first kite, it's a Delta Coyne, a combination of box kite and regular kite. They're supposed to be more stable, which is highly desirable for taking pictures up there.

Ok, so this setup worked alright in the beginning, but it wasn't long before I wanted something better. Being a photographer, I wasn't really thrilled with the quality of the disposable camera, naturally. So I did some research and at the time the Canon Rebel was highly rated for being a nice lightweight SLR, and other folks were sending it airborne so I decided to try it. This required major reconstruction of a new rig, but I was able to improve the design to make the second rig a little lighter than the first. So here's the second rig, for the Canon Rebel.

Here are the two rigs together. I used substantially less wood on the Rebel rig, wanted to use Balsa wood, but I was in a hurry and didn't have any lying around. I shot a few rolls through this setup, but it became obvious to me that I needed remote control.

So by now you're probably wondering how exactly do you attach this thing to the kite? Well, there's a self-leveling suspension system called the 'Picovet' system. One long kite string looped through the four attachment points on top of the rig and fastened at two points on the kite string, down a hundred feet from the kite itself. You don't want to attach it too close to the kite, why, have you ever seen a kite dance around when the wind changes? Well that would translate into blurred pictures, so we attach a ways down the line where it's less chaotic.

These pictures show the Picavet suspension as it is attached to the line. I used simple pull tabs from pop cans as anchor points on the kite string, works like a charm.