The View Up Here

For a long time I had a blog called The Tiny Machine Shop where I described some of the projects I did in the machine shops at work, and in my shop at home. But I found I spent more and more of my time out in the field doing photography, and so the blog was gradually taken over with photography posts rather than machining posts. In the end I wound up changing the name of the blog, if not its URL, to reflect this new direction.

Now we've come full circle, and I expect to be spending more time in the shop and a little less time in the field. Rather than confuse things by changing all the names back, I'm starting a new blog strictly for photography. More specifically, this blog is going to focus on aerial photography done with cameras hanging from kite strings.





I hope, through the months and the years, to convince you that this is not a crazy idea, it's not a wacky fad that will surely pass, and is actually a very valid, very safe form of photography.

What is photography, except a way of selecting a scene, choosing a vantage point, and recording an image to share with others? What is a vantage point, except a place to put a camera? Be it on the ground, on a tripod, in the hand, on a ladder, or even hanging from a kite, there's really no difference. It's a place to put the artist's eye so they can create the image that caught their fancy.

Since this is a new beginning of sorts, please bear with me as I describe the gear I use, the techniques required to use it, describe safe practices, and try to convince you to hang your camera from a kite. If you are coming here from my other blog, this may be old information. If you've been doing kite aerial photography yourself, it will certainly be old information. But if you're a first time reader, preferably with a bent for photography already, you might find something new. I hope you will read on.

-- Tom