Lot’s of people are doing photography from drones these days, but you can also have fun sending your camera up on a kite.  I did this recently, using a GoPro Hero 3 Black camera and a medium sized kite.  It was a lot of fun!

First I found some plastic foam packing material and cut out a rectangular center and taped my GoPro inside.   (I was a little paranoid of the unpredictability of a kite and didn’t like the idea of my GoPro possibly slamming into the ground without a little protection.)

I hooked some hanger wire through the top and looped it, and then tied it to the kite and then added some tape to firm up the connection a bit so that the camera would not wobble as much.  There are ways of further stabilizing it, but this method worked well enough.  It didn’t look “fancy” but it got the job done.

The first launch attempt was kind of wild.  The kite caught the wind and took off, spiraled several times, followed by a dramatic crash landing.

I had the camera set to take a 12MP wide-angle photograph every second.  I found that was not quite frequent enough to get any good shots.

In the second attempt, we added a weight to the base, just to stabilize it a bit because the wind was fairly strong.   I also adjusted the rate to 2 frames per second.

As soon as we added the weight, the wind ironically died down and was not sufficient to lift the kite with the weight, so we took it back off. Then we made another attempt, and found success.  Once we got the kite up high enough, it was in a much better steady wind that carried it higher and higher. I just let the kite stay up high for a while to capture quite a few shots. This approach worked really well.

We brought the camera back down to check our results. Of course with the wide angle lens, depending on the placement of the horizon in the shot, the lens added a bit of distortion, curving the horizon.

This distortion and camera tilt was easily fixed by having Adobe Lightroom CC use it’s “Transform – Level” and the “Enable Profile Corrections” adjustments in the Develop Module  and things were straightened up nicely.

With most of my shots, I had the camera oriented so that you could see the kite in the shot.  I like that perspective because it really establishes the unique and fun context of the image.  This isn’t a drone photo. It’s a kite photo!

If you decide to join in on the fun and send your small camera up on a kite, let me know!  I’d love to see what you came up with!

Kevin Gourley
KGPhotoWorkshops