First, a word about the wind in town: It's far more chaotic than what I'm normally willing to fly in. This is because of Waimea's proximity to Kohala Mountain. The wind spilling off Kohala is turbulent, chok full of gusts and lulls, making Waimea a pretty rotten place for doing kite aerial photography. Nonetheless, it's these same characteristics that make it a great proving ground for new kites and KAP rigs.
I spent the first hour flying a dummy weight. The rig weighed in at 833g, roughly 230g heavier than my old rig, but still considerably lighter than the 4x5 box camera.
Water bottles make great dummy weights for testing loads aloft. Put in enough water to equal the weight of the thing you're testing, and away you go! For this one I had to use a 1 liter bottle because the smaller ones I'm used to using simply didn't hold enough water. I tested it on my 6' rokkaku, and later my Flowform 16. For dummy weight testing I used the FF16 with 15' of fuzzy tail. But later I added an extra 15' of tail to slow down the movements of the kite.
With the extra tail on the kite settled down and flew straight enough that I wasn't afraid of having it go into a nose dive. After a brief hunt for the 1/4"-20 screw to hold the camera onto the rig, I put it up into the air.
The next few pictures were uploaded at the full 4000x3000 resolution to Flickr. They're unedited, straight off the camera. Most of the pictures I post here have had significant color balancing, exposure leveling, and rudimentary sharpening applied to them before posting. These have not. They're straight off the chip:
Feel free to follow the link on any of them to see the full resolution image.
Since this is a holiday weekend, I hope to get out at least once more and go somewhere a little more photogenic. The testing is done. Time to move on to doing kite aerial photography with this camera!
Tom
No comments:
Post a Comment