The stunning aerial photos taken with just a camera and a kite - by the inventor of 'kite-ography'

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:06:16 -0700 (PDT), Val Hallah
wrote:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...mera-kite.html

Let's see....

I flew a Brownie Box camera on a string of 4 box-kites 47 years ago. Using
a string dipped in potassium-nitrate to make it into a slow-burning fuse.
It would eventually, many minutes later, burn the string that was
stretching the rubber-band attached to the shutter release. You timed the
delay by the length of the string-fuse.

He's 47 now, he got his first camera when he was 12. That's 35 years ago.
Yet he invented aerial kite photography. The only reason I did it was
because so many had done it before me with much more elaborate equipment.
Fancy "Cody Box-Kites" being the preferred lifting device for kite aerial
photographers. I was an extremely precocious child. I wanted to see if I
could do it even more inexpensively using whatever I had at hand. The paper
box-kites, 4 of them for enough lift for that heavy Brownie-cam, cost me a
whopping $3.00 at the time. That put a hefty dent in my piggy-bank. I would
have made the kites, but I was too anxious. 4 of them would have taken a
long time. The cotton string and rubber-band from a junk-drawer, the
potassium-nitrate from my home-brew chemistry kit. Back then you could buy
just about any chemical you wanted from the local drug-store. Oh, I forgot
to mention. I also added a wind-vane made of a discarded aluminum pie-pan
to the back of the camera. So I could point the camera in whatever
direction to the wind that I wanted.

Yeah, sure, he was "the inventor of 'kite-ography'.

Google for KAP (kite aerial photography) if you want to get a history
lesson of cameras being flown on kites.

I bet Al Gore is this guy's brother. You know Al? The chap that invented
the internet.

The pomposity of these foolish brits never ceases to amaze.