The Situation
Your friendly local web page designer requires a series of aerial photographs of your school,
for use on the web page. Professional (aircraft-based) aerial photographers are:
too expensive,
inflexible (i.e. they won't take exactly the right shots),
required to fly too high and too far away from the school, and finally, they are
unable to operate on the required days.
(Incidentally, you can view the gallery of aeroplane-aerial photos of the school
here.
Design Brief
Research, design and build a system which can be attached to the line of a kite to enable
remote controlled photography.
Assume —for this exercise— that you already have at your
disposal a variety of kites capable of lifting a payload such
as this.
Restrictions/Requirements
The final, operational system must:
lift itself to a considerable height on a kiteline (and therefore be
reasonably light);
be able to be aimed with precision;
be able to fire the shutter at your command (from the ground!);
produce sharp, blur-free photographs;
be (reasonably) inexpensive.
Research
This is not a unique project—neither www-wise nor in terms of this website
alone. Look here or (for more detail)
here for information on the author's previous attempt
(shown at right).
The shortcomings of the previous version may be found listed here.
The aim of this project is to produce a cradle and mount which will address these
shortcomings.
Research for this project has been by:
browsing camera manufacturer's internet sites (largely unproductive);
annoying local camera retailers (you have no idea how much those folks
don't know...);
annoying local hobby shop proprietors (ditto comment);
browsing Kite Photography sites on the internet (very productive);
I won't maintain a list of KAP sites here
(apart from this one)
as they tend to be a little too volatile. Enter "KAP" into Google or Alta Vista (forget ANZWERS -
its hopeless) and do your own search.
This project is a complex one. The following pages explore progress on the
camera and modifications to its shutter release, the
cradle which aims the camera in two axes, and the
pendulum suspension which holds the whole structure level and
stable on the kiteline. The
whole system, assembled and ready to launch, can be seen
here.
Research