Kite Aerial Panorama

yeah, about 1m

So... care to share more than just 'kite' for equipment? I built a rig myself for a D50 and Sigma 8mm lens, but ended up not getting enough 'airtime' with it to get some decent KAP panoramas. As a newby in KAP, I was having some problems with maintaining the height of the camera, but I might have been unlucky with the irregular wind.

KAP is never easy, wind is never the same, I noticed that a rig with more than 1,5kg weight will make kites to have problems with height. Once I put around 2kg on line, the wind was really strong but no matter how big the kite was it just did not want to fly high. So.. I sold Pro1, build another rig and all that is flying is just around 1kg now. I buit my kites myself - different sizes of rokkaku - in my opinion they are best as I can get them in the air even with no wind at ground level. Take a look here: http://lookdigital.pl/kap_panoramas.htm
and here: http://www.warszawa.vr360.pl/ (2 more panos in the citi).

If you ask me, I don't know, this is the best I can get from a 7mln px IXUS, it could be better, but the camera's cmos isn't as good as the one from 400D. So I needed to process the image to improve the quality. I am curious, myself, what others think about the qulity of this (and other) my kite photos.

For KAP panoramas, these are high quality indeed. I am looking at using a D50 + Sigma 8mm (or possibly a 10.5 mm), with only one axis of rotation to keep the rig light and simple. I'm hoping that will give me just that bit of an edge over yours ;-) But like I said, I'm having trouble keeping my rig at the same height...

Keeping at the right height is not a problem, but making the rig fly heigh - will be. Cut the rig as much as possible, my experience is that a heavy rig works like an anchor, ok, I mostly use rokkakus, probably Flowforms or KaPilots may have more power, but roks fly heigh and FF need ground wind - so nothing is perfect. And One more thing, not sure if you thought of it. The photo, actually most of my photos, need more than just one photo streight down, a pano looks nicer, more 3d like when there is something that goes right into the sky, it is heigher than the horizont, otherwise it looks rather flat. Sure at that time I also flew much heigher, but I choce more pano prcessing and close distans than a pano that shows nothing. Think of it, some movement of a rig is an issue, really. Soon small cameras will have more px and more quality, I might change my IXUS 700 to 900 with 9 mln px next season.
D50? Shouldn't you rather have a 5D just for one shot?

I am not going to do one-shots, hence my need to keep the rig at a somewhat constant height ;-)

The 5D is too expensive, and too heavy for my KAP experiments...

Aldo, this is not very likely. Wind is always different. I sometimes end up with hours of work to make a final pano having huge parallax. Of course when the camera is not the heighest thing around. Take a look here: http://www.zamek-krolewski.vr360.pl/ The "round" photos are quite big. I think I used 4 or 5 from that set to stitch the final pano. You can give it a try...

I shoot most of my panoramas handheld, so I am used to working up to 2 hours in photoshop... I am going to rebuild my current rig so it points down by ~20-30 degrees (instead of my current 45 degrees), and will keep experimenting... Flying kites is fun anyway!

Last season I used a Flowform, but I am also planning to build a custom Rokaku (or Hakaku).

Well, good luck then. I made my mind up: I want to fly everywhere and anytime if it's only possible, I cut on weight, build another rig, I probably had around 100 flights last year. The only thing I need is a balloon when there is no wind, I should also get some extra radios for super light rig and I guess this is it. If you have any problems or need some help on this subject, let me know, you can find my mail, I can attatch you some photos or something.

off course its a high quality photo, i ment 'HIGH' Quality, because its taken 'HIGH' in the sky.... sorry for the misunderstanding.... :-)

I like it a lot

Can you advice me where I could post something about kap? blog...?

Hi there, i opened a new post to talk specifically about this kind of thing last night,
http://ivrpa.org/node/974
I have been asked in there to add content into the blogs

Cheers
Ian
www.QuickTimeVirtualReality.com

ok, forum for members, Darek