"Go Fly a Kite!" or How to Get Started with KAP

In the hopes that the previous two posts have piqued your interest in KAP, and you're itching to get going, the following posts should help you on your way. But it's not a straightforward task, and there's a fair bit of work involved in order to get there. Don't worry, though. Most of it's actually a lot of fun. In order to start doing kite aerial photography, the first thing you need to do, quite literally, is go fly a kite.





This is one area where KAP differs from most other forms of photography. I can't describe how many times I've been out doing photography on the ground, and the light just didn't work, the weather wasn't right, the subject wasn't what I thought it would be, etc. The least extreme of these have been a whole series of incidents that begin with "Stop the car! Stop the car!" The most extreme involved lugging two camera bags and two tripods up a cliffside trail in Zion National Park and almost having to choose between losing the gear or losing the me when I stumbled. It was anything but fun, and resulted in not one usable shot.

KAP, on the other hand, always begins and ends with flying a kite. Even if the light's not right, even if the scene just didn't work out, you still get to go out and fly a kite. Early on, the typical KAPer will only own one or two kites, so situations will arise where they don't have the right kite for the wind they've been given. But much of the time the way this plays out is that there's plenty of wind for the kite, just not enough for the kite to lift the camera. In which case the entire outing isn't wasted, it just means you spent your time flying a kite rather than taking pictures.

I could point out all sorts of reasons why this is a good thing: You get the opportunity to research the wind available at this spot. You get to decide if shooting here is worth buying or making a lighter or heavier wind kite to add to your stable of kites. You get to see if the wind direction available here gives you the access you want for your subject, or if you need to find a better spot to fly from. But the real reason is that flying kites really is fun, regardless of whether you have a camera on your kite line or not. For this and for so many other reasons, KAP begins, ends, and depends on a real enjoyment of flying kites.

But not any kite will do. It's an unfortunate truism that most of the kites sold these days are, aerodynamically speaking, disasters. It doesn't matter how cool a kite looks, or if it has wings that really flap (really!), or that it has your favorite anime character silk screened across the sail. Most of the time the kites that are designed with these features in mind will set aside other features, like stability, lift, durability, ease of assembly, etc. in order to achieve their artistic goals. What you are left with is a kite that looks great pinned to the wall, but one that will happily fall right out of the sky if used as a kite.

A good KAP kite requires a couple of things:

• It needs to be able to fly - This should go without saying, but it also means that kites from practically any place but a dedicated kite shop or kite maker really won't fit the bill.
• It needs to be stable in the air - This is where you start narrowing down the available designs. Not every design is a stable flyer. With KAP, your kite is your tripod in the sky, so you need to use stable kites.
• It needs to be able to lift your camera - If the kite never develops enough line pull to lift your rig, you won't be able to use it to take pictures from the air.
• It needs to not develop so much lift that it's hard to fly - Ideally you want your kite to be able to lift your rig, but not much more than that. I like about a 4:1 ratio, but I'm conservative. Some people prefer even less pull, closer to a 2:1 ratio of pull to weight. If your kite is pulling 10:1 or 20:1, it's like trying to hold a truck back with a rope and still do photography. It's not fun.

I'd like to be able to list kite designs suitable to KAP, but that would be folly. Old designs are re-discovered, shortcomings in existing designs get addressed, and new designs are invented all the time. Any such list would instantly be out of date. Your best bet is to look into what kites people are flying for KAP, to find out what conditions they're flying them in, and to work from there. For my own part, I currently use two Flowforms, one for high wind and one for medium wind, a 6' rokkaku for lighter wind, and a Fled for lighter wind still. But other people use delta kites, doperos, tritons, calomils, pilots, and a whole host of others. And even this list leaves out all the modifications people have made to their kites to make them more suitable to KAP. Do your research. It won't be time wasted.

Once you've chosen a kite, go fly it. Find out what its wind range is, how it likes to be launched, what it does when it gets too much wind, what it does when it gets too little. Does it like to over-fly zenith? If so, how does it recover? Does it have any tendency to turn to one side or the other in a gust? And how does it recover from that? There is an endless list of quesitons you can only answer by getting out with your kite and flying it.

But it shouldn't be an onerous task. After all, kites really are fun to fly. And if they're not, maybe KAP is the wrong choice for you.

-- Tom