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First flight April 2007 We took out a kite that we had in storage and attached an 'old' Canon PowerShot A400 digital camera to the string at two points several metres from the kite. John set the camera's shutter delay to 10 seconds and launched the kite. Approximately 13 seconds into the flight (after the shutter had fired), just as the camera was becoming stable, one of the kite's wooden dowelling spars snapped in a gust of wind and fell out of the sky (we will replace this old brittle wood with something synthetic). The kite looked a little sad, but the camera was undamaged!
Millennium Wood, Armadale (Apperley Rokkaku kite / Canon PowerShot A400 camera) The result - a very blurred John at the bottom of the picture and the Hardhill Road at the top. The kite had no problem in lifting the 285gm camera in a gentle breeze. Dare we risk a better camera? Probably the best approach, at least initially, is to use an old film camera with a wide angle lens. We are intending to use Quasar (UK) Ltd radio remote controls ( 1 2 ), both single and double channel depending on the camera. More powerful systems* (range > 60m) may be considered later, as a kite flying at a height of ~60m at an angle of 45 degrees is ~85m away. The next kite that we will try is a 2.42 x 1.13m Power Sled 24 ______________________ Second flight May 2007 To make the camera more stable, a simple Picavet rig was constructed for the Power Sled 24 kite. This was a 15 minute job costing less than £5, including the camera mount, which was the top of a small £1 camera tripod.
The camera was mounted further from the kite than last time ~14m (46 feet). The camera was an old compact Fuji DL-500 Wide, which has a 28mm lens and a maximum shutter speed of 1/250th second. A single channel Quasar remote control was used to fire the shutter. (It had been hoped that the remote receiver could be wired into the camera's shutter 'switch', but the camera was found not to have one! Under the shutter button there are three conducting contacts which short connections on a circuit board when the shutter button is pressed. However, it was discovered that once powered up, the shutter could be fired by disconnecting and then re-connecting the battery, as long as the shutter button was held down. So the remote receiver was wired into the battery circuit at one of the battery's terminals and a small aluminium clamp used to hold the shutter down. The remote was then used to transiently break the camera's power circuit to fire the shutter.)
Rosie and John in Millennium Wood, Armadale
Southern entrance to Millennium Wood, Armadale. Brickworks chimney top left (Power Sled 24 / Fuji DL-500, Kodak VR Plus 400) The Picavet rig was much simpler to make than we expected. It performed so well that pictures were sharp even during the ascent* Using the rig, pictures taken on a 10 second delay are possible (for those who want to try it without the expense of a remote control) as are movie clips using a digital camera. We may add a movie clip at a later date. (* Our preferred method is to fly the kite initially with at least 30 metres of line. If the kite is stable, the line is then walked down as far as the attachment clips and the rig attached. The line is then slowly released by waking back to the reel which is either held or tethered) |
