I came across this interesting video and wanted to post it here. It's about a ten minute clip that I think is well worth watching. My apologies in advance if this has been posted before.
Charles C. Benton is a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley. In this video he says he was spending a lot of time shooting pictures in support of his lectures, and loved it as a tool, but wanted to find an outlet for his creativity, so he started experimenting with kites and aerial photography.
"One of the differences between kite photography and airplane or helicopter photography is that it occurs a lot between that region just immediately above our heads and maybe up to around 200 feet-and it's very difficult to occupy that space with a helicopter or an airplane-the sort of lower level view that no one's much explored-there are not many techniques that will put you there.
With a kite you can hang a camera there and sort of hover. You're close, you can see detail-the strength of shadows in a particular composition or the texture of the ground-it's intimate."
It's a pleasure to see how clever and creative this man is. He builds all of his own kites and came up with many interesting mechanisms for aiming and triggering his kite-born cameras. One of the earliest of which was an ingenious Rube Goldbergesque contraption using rubber bands, silly putty and a ping pong ball!
"One of the neat things about kite photography has been that you have to invent your own gear, so I'm always tinkering around on the workbench building apparatus. How can I achieve getting a camera in the air and pointing in the right direction and sufficiently stable to capture a useful image."
http://www.wimp.com/kitephotos/
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