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From a recent outing with the Kona Camera Club to Kiholo Bay
A honu, or Pacific Green Sea Turtle, at Kiholo Bay.
This was the first time I ever did two-person KAP. In this case I was flying the kite and a fellow member of the Kona Camera Club, Craig Elevitch, was driving the rig and camera. I stood directly upwind of the honu, and Craig was about 90 degrees off to one side. I let out line, keeping the rig low to the water, and when Craig called "Stop!" I stopped letting out line and Craig hit the shutter. I'm more than pleased with the results.
Umbrella's on a hot dish of sand.
Pictures taken from a kite (KAP) over Marco Island, FL session spanning March 9-13, 2008.
Green Sand Beach on the Big Island of Hawai`i has sand that is largely composed of olivine crystals. It really is green.
Unfortunately, most people who come here never see the back side of the outcropping that provides the sand for Green Sand Beach. Some of the best terrain on this side of the island is on the back side of that outcropping.
Green Sand Beach on the Big Island of Hawai`i has sand that is largely composed of olivine crystals. It really is green.
The outcropping that provides the olivine-rich sand is out of view to the left. Erosion has formed a bowl-shaped bay with the beach at the bottom.
Low altitude aerial view of spinner dolphins swimming off the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, Hawaii, USA
20+ knot winds made KAP difficult at best, but the wind across Kua Bay was steady enough to fly a Flowform 8 and lift my BBKK rig. At times, though, the rig was at risk of catching surf spray.
Number two in a series of wave abstracts.
I couldn't get a lot of height because of the high wind speed and the low line angle on my only high wind kite, my Flowform 8. So I spent time playing with the waves.
Equipment Used:
Kite - Flowform 8 + 15' Fuzzy Tail
Line - #200 Dacron
Rig - R/C BBKK
Camera - Canon A650IS
A modified BBKK to carry a Canon 400D digital SLR aloft. Features 1:5 gearing on the 360 pan servo, a gentLED electronic shutter control, and carbon legs to keep the camera out of the mud and sand when landing and taking off.
The wetlands are back! The wetlands are back!
The last few times I went to Pololu Valley, the wetlands were nothing but dried mud and dead grass. This just goes to show you what a wet winter and a tropical storm will do for a valley!
This is from my second "real" KAP trip (meaning: not doing KAP at Hapuna Beach while the family swims) since finalizing the video downlink hardware on my rig. I'm still not 100% convinced a video downlink KAP rig is the right tool for panoramas, but it did give me complete confidence that I had 60-70% overlap on all frames, that I had good focus, and that my horizon was reasonably level in all frames. This was a lot closer to hand-holding a pano than using a dedicated pano rig, but it worked well.
Low altitude aerial view of spinner dolphins swimming off the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, Hawaii, USA
Arrrr!!
(In celebration of "Talk Like A Pirate Day", September 19th!)
When you haul your KAP gear down to the beach and there's not enough wind to even make your hair flutter, you have to do SOMETHING to keep busy. My wife made a big sand sculpture of a Portugese Man-O-War. Me? I made a dragon. My kids supplied the treasure for it to guard.
Midair photograph of my go-to KAP rig as of July, 2013, loaded with a Canon T2i. This rig will also accommodate my Canon A650 and my Gopro Hero3, complete with video down-link for each camera.
The current state of my KAP rig as of June 17, 2013.
For this photo it's outfitted with my Canon A650IS, but it'll also take a Canon EOS T2i or a Gopro.
The rig is a slightly modified Brooxes BBKK with the Brooxes Better Gear Guide and the carbon legs. It uses a utility frame rather than a tilt frame to hold the camera.
Power is provided by an 500Mah 3S LiPo battery. A UBEC provides regulated 5V power to the radio/servo system, and the battery's full voltage goes into a 5.8GHz video transmitter.
The video system uses a pair of circularly-polarized antennas: a pinwheel on the transmitter, and a cloverleaf on the receiver. (Thanks, IBCrazy!)
The transmitter has a stub extension cable to get the antenna farther from the metal frame of the KAP rig. Testing this in the field at well over 500', there's zero loss of signal regardless of KAP rig orientation. This is a far cry from the behavior without the stub extension, which causes total signal loss when the antenna is on the far side of the rig from the receiver.
The ground unit is a cheap 2.4GHz Chinese RC radio, at this point completely unmodified except for the monitor mount, which is just a bent piece of 1/16" aluminum bolted to the transmitter case. I'd like to replace that with something a little thicker since it's supporting a much heavier monitor now.
The monitor is a Feelworld LCD panel with the 5.8GHz receiver and a 3S LiPo battery attached to the back. The entire video system is completely self-contained, and can be removed from the transmitter by loosening a single thumb screw.
Everything, including my winder, a Flow Form 16 kite, hat, gloves (GLOVES!), anemometer, and all other associated doodads, fits inside a single rucksack. I have a second bag to hold my framed kites, but often I'll just grab the one I need and leave the rest in my car when I hike in to do KAP.
One side-effect of the big monitor I didn't expect: When the kite flying gets dicey, I like to put my transmitter on the ground and pay 100% attention to the kite. But with a monitor this large, even looking down at the ground the image is completely legible. I found myself walking in to a location, rough-aiming the camera, and then paying complete attention to the kite. It's a comfortable way to work.
I'm almost happy with this setup. I'd like to find a better way to mount the video transmitter antenna, and I'd like to play around with pendulum suspensions and brushless gimbals. But those are experiments for another day. For now, this setup works GREAT!
Kite Aerial Photograph: The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. See www.phipps.conservatory.org/.
See my KAP Pittsburgh set
Taken using my gentled auto led, on my BBKK.
Thank you to my flicker KAP group colleagues for the repeated advice to "get closer": Motivated by this, we went out on the morning when a Wind Advisory had been forcast for Pittsburgh. My wife fortunately calmed my worries about launching in such windy conditions, and so we were able to fly much closer than ever before to the Phipps (as usually there is never enough wind here, in the 'wind shadow' of the building). Fortunately, all went well (although the kite did do an amazing frightening loop at one point), and we managed to get several very nice, closer, photographs! And we got the kite down well before the much higher winds & tornado watch later in the afternoon - there were gusts > 30 mph shortly after we were flying here - see this wind graph for that date from Carnegie Mellon University only a few block away.
I used my rokkaku for all of the pictures at Lighthouse during the second day of Worldwide KAP Week 2009. It was light at the beginning, barely lofting the rig. But toward the end the storm system you can see approaching in this picture finally hit, bringing with it some serious wind. I had to walk the rokkaku down. Thank goodness there's room out there to do it!
From a recent outing with the Kona Camera Club to Kiholo Bay
A honu, or Pacific Green Sea Turtle, at Kiholo Bay.
This was the first time I ever did two-person KAP. In this case I was flying the kite and a fellow member of the Kona Camera Club, Craig Elevitch, was driving the rig and camera. I stood directly upwind of the honu, and Craig was about 90 degrees off to one side. I let out line, keeping the rig low to the water, and when Craig called "Stop!" I stopped letting out line and Craig hit the shutter. I'm more than pleased with the results.
There's a story behind this one:
I've done kite aerial photography at Kiholo Bay on numerous occasions now, but I haven't really been happy with any of them. They either wind up not really catching the character of the inlet, or they wind up being these long, narrow vertical panoramas that just feel funky when I look at them. Maybe this is why I kept going back.
I thought over the visual elements available at that location and realized I'd been doing the bulk of my photography from the wrong location. So out came Google Earth and one of my earlier Photosynths from Kiholo Bay, and I went looking.
There's a spot maybe 500' from the tip of the inlet and about 350' up off the ground that had just the view I wanted: inlet, reef, Hualalai, and the long arm of the far side of the bay. This location is a perfect candidate for doing the photography from a kite since the location is too remote to make RC Heli access easy, and a full-sized helicopter would need special clearance to fly this low. I had the plan, next all I needed was the weather.
The wind forecasts for the Big Island looked perfect: 4kt onshores, and a nice long lead-in off the water. I was looking forward to some clean laminar wind with a light wind kite, and some good slack line flying. Perfection. I felt so good, I brought all my kids. I'm used to doing KAP with my son, so this wasn't a huge stretch.
In the afternoons the volcanic gases from Kilauea have been making the air near Kailua-Kona opaque. Kiholo Bay is close enough to Kailua-Kona to make this an issue. I'd love to do this in the wonderful late evening light, but I opted for the clear skies of early morning. We did the 30 minute hike from the car to the water, then the kids all got their swimsuits on while I went walking. The wind was strange, and didn't match the wind models at all. Downshore, gusty, and varying between 10+kts and 2kts. With some misgivings I pulled out my 6' rokkaku and went to work.
In the end the pictures came out well, though one lull did land my rig on the lava. It fell behind a ridge where I couldn't see it, so I did the best I could to minimize damage. Camera tilt to horizontal, no yanking on the line, and sure enough the rig lifted a couple of seconds later. But the impact was hard enough to cause concern. I checked everything when I brought it down, but camera, movements, even the legs were all fine. (Outstanding engineering on the rig, Brooks!!)
For this I used Manu's burst KAP, done in two rows. Total time from first shot to last shot was 16 seconds. Nine images were used to build the composite. The final composite was 9059x4800. Big enough to print wall-sized and not lose much, if anything.
20+ knot winds made KAP difficult at best, but the wind across Kua Bay was steady enough to fly a Flowform 8 and lift my BBKK rig. At times, though, the rig was at risk of catching surf spray.
Number six in a series of wave abstracts.
I couldn't get a lot of height because of the high wind speed and the low line angle on my only high wind kite, my Flowform 8. So I spent time playing with the waves.
Equipment Used:
Kite - Flowform 8 + 15' Fuzzy Tail
Line - #200 Dacron
Rig - R/C BBKK
Camera - Canon A650IS
20+ knot winds made KAP difficult at best, but the wind across Kua Bay was steady enough to fly a Flowform 8 and lift my BBKK rig. At times, though, the rig was at risk of catching surf spray.
Number one in a series of wave abstracts.
I couldn't get a lot of height because of the high wind speed and the low line angle on my only high wind kite, my Flowform 8. So I spent time playing with the waves.
Equipment Used:
Kite - Flowform 8 + 15' Fuzzy Tail
Line - #200 Dacron
Rig - R/C BBKK
Camera - Canon A650IS
The InterContinental Tahiti Resort “Motu” (islet) taken from a kite
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Ricoh GX 100 – Delta R8 by Dan Leigh – RC BBKK by Brooks Leffler – NE wind 10 knots - April, 26, 2008
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This is the state of my KAP gear as of 5 March, 2012. On the left is my KAP rig and camera. On the right is my ground radio unit.
The RC link is handled by a 2.4GHz HobbyKing radio and receiver. These are almost identical to the 2.4GHz Turborix radio I used on my A650 rig. Video is handled by a 5.8GHz video Rx/Tx pair using circularly polarized antennas.
The switch directly below the video receiver antenna on the right side of the radio controls power to all of the video hardware. On the ground unit this is handled by directly switching the power to the video receiver and monitor. On the KAP rig it's handled by using one of the RC radio's channels to control an RC switch and boost regulator that powers the video transmitter. Everything is keyed off of the same switch.
Coastline abstract from Mahukona
Abstracts are uploaded full size in case anyone wants to use one as a wallpaper.
This is it, where the rubber hits the road. Or the sky. Or... Ok, wrong metaphor.
Anyway, this is my mainstay KAP rig, the one I originally built around a Nikon Coolpix 5600 and later rebuilt around a Canon A650IS. It's the same rig I later added a HoVer axis to using parts from Brooxes.
Now I've rebuilt it around a Canon T2i.
The T2i with its 18-55mm kit lens represents something of a sweet spot in the Canon DSLR line. It's an 18MP crop sensor camera, it has really good noise characteristics, and for the sensor size and performance it's the lightest camera they offer. I lost the HoVer axis during the transition, but I only bumped the weight by 185g. Not bad!
Not shown in this, or any of the other photos in this set at the moment, are the safety tethers I haven't installed yet. I always fly with some kind of tether on my cameras in case something cuts loose. I'm planning on installing two for this rig, which will hook to the shoulder strap lugs on the camera.
Brooxes Basic KAP Kit (frame plus cradle) with my G7. The whole contraption will bounce off the ground if the kite comes down gently but it's best not to make a habit of it.
I finally put it all together!
This is my same ol' same ol' Brooxes BBKK KAP rig with a new tilt bracket I modified to carry two Canon Powershot A2200 cameras. One is modified for the IR, the other is unmodified and provides RGB channels. The cameras are kinda squashed together, but the one in the rear can't see the one in the front.
Both are triggered by a modified GentLED-CHDK cable. I picked up a bunch of right angle adapter cables off of Ebay, lopped off the ends of two of them, and spliced them into my trusty GentLED-CHDK cable I've been using since I got my A650. After one hiccup (ground = blue?!) I got it working.
The rear camera provides the video feed for the downlink. Either the RGB or the IR camera can be mounted in that position, so it's a matter of choice.
I've tried this on the ground, and did some end-to-end tests to make sure both cameras trigger. But I haven't had a chance to get it in the air yet. As soon as I finished everything up and went outside the wind died (of course!) I hope to test this later in the week.
Prior to work on my KAP rig I took pictures of my rig as it is now (July 2009). Since the last time I photographed my rig back in late 2008, I've added some new features:
- The aging AM Futaba radio was changed out for a 6-channel Turborix 2.4GHz radio. No more dangling antenna wire.
- The Picavet was replaced with a Brooxes Folding Picavet. This makes things a lot more compact in my KAP bag.
- The shutter servo assembly was replaced with a GentLED-CHDK cable. This lets the radio trigger the camera through the camera's USB port.
In comparison, the work I have planned is really quite minimal:
- Brooks mentioned that the tilt servo can be installed in either orientation: axis on top or axis on bottom. I've got mine set up with the axis on bottom, but could install it with the axis on top and shave some height off my rig. This would necessitate using a different hole for the corresponding tilt axis on the other side. No sweat.
- Likewise the gear reduction on the pan axis, the Brooxes Better Gear Guide, is installed with risers and a long pan axle. Strictly speaking I don't need the risers (or the weight!) so I'm planning to lower it and use a shorter pan axle. This may cause interference between the pan servo and the top of the camera, but it looks like it shouldn't.
- All my black oxide steel cap head screws are rusting!! I was all set to make the previous two mods until I saw the state of my poor screws! DOH! So I'm taking inventory of the screws I need so I can replace them with stainless hardware.
This last one isn't sitting too well with me. Many months ago I had a conversation with Henry Jebe, and he pointed out that for the loads we're putting on our hardware, nylon screws would have more than enough holding force. We're not building battleships here, folks. KAP gear is lightweight and can deal with a little spring in the hardware, for crying out loud! And the weight difference between nylon and stainless is pretty darned large. This would be an easy way to save some weight and never have to deal with corrosion again. If I can find a good set of nylon hardware, I'm moving away from steel altogether.
One bit of hardware I'm still clinging to is the full-sized 4xAAA battery pack. I have a 2/3 AAA pack, but I really like this one better. A couple of reasons:
- Eneloops have really phenomenal shelf life. Charge them, leave them for a month, and they'll still do two days worth of KAP without charging.
- I have a "fire and forget" charging setup for the AAA batteries using the same charger I use for my camera and transmitter batteries. One charger fits all.
- If all else fails I can go to the nearest store, buy a four-pack of AAA alkalines, and still be flying later in the day.
The cost, of course, is that I take a hit in weight. Except for the camera the batteries are easily the heaviest thing on my rig. I'm still interested in shaving weight where I can, but I'll have to come up with some pretty compelling reasons aside from weight to move away from the AAA Eneloop pack.
A fantastic day of KAP with Ramon in his stomping grounds: the windmills in Zaandijk.
This is de Zoeker, an oil mill, Jonge Schaap, a sawmill, with de Os and de Bonte Hen in the background.
From a recent outing with the Kona Camera Club to Kiholo Bay
I have a thing for patterns in the sand. There's a nice mixed-sand beach at the end of the arm of land on the seaward side of the inlet. White sand and black sand get mixed by the waves and result in some really neat patterns.
The wind wasn't great, but I flew my Dopero and managed to get a camera airborne. Not enough wind for the T2i, but I've started carrying my A650 in my bag again. Yay for interchangeable video cables!
I liked the way the surf lined up on this one, even if my shadow isn't really where I want it in the frame.
Kite Aerial Photograph: The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is in Schenley Park. See www.phipps.conservatory.org/. The majority of the building on the right in the background are University of Pittsburgh buildings on the Oakland campus.
See my KAP Pittsburgh set
Taken using my gentled auto led, on my BBKK.
Speed boat racing across the water.
Auto KAP session with Canon A570IS, CHDK, AuRiCo, modified BBKK rig.
Pictures taken from a kite (KAP) over Marco Island, FL session spanning March 9-13, 2008
And the roof of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope headquarters building was never the same again...
Earlier this year we installed 562 solar panels on our roof to help offset the cost of our electricity usage. Unfortuantely, even with that number of panels it wasn't enough to offset everything. So the company is still making efforts to reduce energy usage.
Shown here is another view of the HQ building. The shop building just peeking into the right edge of the frame was also paved with panels.
All three of the photos from this set were done using my T2i rig with video downlink. For tightly framed photos like this, the video feedback is quite useful. None of these were cropped. What I saw was what I got.
Low altitude aerial panorama of the Hapuna Pricne Resort, looking north toward Kohala. Island of Hawaii, Hawaii, USA
It's been over six months since I've had conditions favorable to testing my aerial 4x5 box camera. I went out today expressly to test some recent modifications, but the wind didn't cooperate.
Several of the recent changes are apparent in this ground shot:
1 - The triangular sighting guides on the various faces of the box camera let you see what the field of view is before getting it airborne. The pan and tilt axes can be set on the ground, but once airborne you can't change the pointing.
2 - The Nikon Coolpix 5600 strapped to the side is for testing purposes only. This was an idea given to me by Henry Jebe: Stick a digital camera on the side of the rig, zoom all the way in, and set it on movie mode. No better way to find out how stable the rig is.
3 - I shortened both arms of the Picavet. I found that overly long arms on the Picavet actually led to stability issues. The smaller Picavet doesn't apply as much of a righting moment to the rig, but once it's in position, the smaller Picavet seems to do a better job of keeping it there. (I was planning to test this with #2.)
4 - I added legs. I can't count how many times the legs on my BBKK rig have saved me. The time had come. (Plus I didn't want to have to rebuild the thing if I did crash it...)
5 - I have some leg weights to test changing the moment of rotational inertia, but these are not pictured here. This test would also use the digital "outrigger" camera.
6 - I've got a KAPFeather from Jones Airfoils I was also wanting to play with and test with the outrigger. Because of the low mass of the camera and the large cross-sectional area, I'm not sure it will respond the same as my BBKK rig.
One other test I wanted to run that had nothing to do with stability was basic filtering. I played around with some color shots I've done at Kua Bay and at Anaehoomalu Bay, and I determined that a green Wratten filter was a good approach to use with B&W film on the ocean. Earlier un-filtered shots rendered the water and the rocks at almost the same tonality. The green filter bumps vegetation up while bumping the water down, leaving the rocks almost the same.
I'm hoping to more or less get out of the R&D phase on this camera so I can do a complete re-build of the top bracket and legs. It's handy to be able to just knock holes in a camera / KAP rig to tack on yet another component, but the whole thing is starting to get a little ugly.
In the hopes of better wind tomorrow, and more thorough tests to go along with it...
This is why it's so hard to do two-person KAP with my son at the Old Kona Airport Park: the playground is actually really cool! Distractions distractions...
There's an unfortunate amount of distortion in this panorama, but it does a good job of showing the view from up here. The Summit Ridge really is a beautiful vantage point for seeing the Island of Hawai`i.
Setup: Canon A650IS, Brooxes BBKK Rig, AuRiCo Rig Controller, Flowform 16, #200 Dacron, New Winder